Sunday 27 September: MPs should be doing more to defend their constituents’ liberties

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/2020/09/26/letters-mps-should-defend-constituents-liberties/

716 thoughts on “Sunday 27 September: MPs should be doing more to defend their constituents’ liberties”

  2. ‘Morning All

    Funny Old World

    Looking at the DT headlines on the main page,news and UK news not a dickey-bird about a protest by tens of thousands against the lockdown…………..I must have dreamed it

    The desperate worldwide search for a covid case under 30 has succeeded,a man with double pneumonia and covid has been found in Tenerife…………strange after all the scare-mongering I would have thought any UK ICU could have given us dozens of cases……

    Oh Wait………….

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/69d1f4d997c429afee450519360f53a87cc0e36f52a1a915feacce60d3a97af6.jpg

    https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-AM_T8lTv6Mc/XprTWMXhOhI/AAAAAAAAFLQ/Sqwko5pLzno69VF_vDw8XXESUa2DGOa7ACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/.1.jpg
    Like mushrooms they try and keep us in the dark and feed us utter bullshite

  3. DACRE WANTS “WONDERFUL” BBC SAVED [Except he doesn’t really mean it]

    Tim Shipman is reporting in the Sunday Times that Boris has lined up Paul Dacre, the legendary former editor of the Daily Mail, to run Ofcom and newly ennobled Charles Moore to become chairman of the BBC. The chattering classes are aghast that these jobs could be going to social conservatives. This is not the kind of minority group advancement of which they approve…

    Dacre outlined the problems at the BBC in his Cudlipp lecture of 2007. He focused on the problem of BBC bias and the exercising of “cultural Marxism” in which it tries to undermine society. He identified the inherent statist bias of the public sector broadcaster:

    “… BBC journalism starts from the premise of left-wing ideology: it is hostile to conservatism and the traditional right, Britain’s past and British values, America, Ulster unionism, Euroscepticism, capitalism and big business, the countryside, Christianity and family values. Conversely, it is sympathetic to Labour, European federalism, the state and state spending, mass immigration, minority rights, multiculturalism, alternative lifestyles, abortion, and progressiveness in the education and the justice systems.”

    He predicted that what has happened in America, with Fox News challenging the once dominant liberal media, would eventually take place in Britain. 13 years later it looks likely to come to pass if Andrew Neil is successful…

    The speech was a tour de force and well worth reading today to see what Dacre’s agenda would be:

    How often do you hear, on the Today programme or Newsnight, contemptuous references to the tabloid or popular press as if it was some disembodied monster rather than the very embodiment of the views of the great majority of the British people?

    Fair enough. The tabloid press – and it’s getting confusing here, because the Times and the Independent are, of course, tabloids now, and the Mail has more quality readers than most of the so-called quality papers put together – is big enough to look after itself. Except I don’t think it is fair, because this ignores the ever-burgeoning influence of the most powerful media organisation in the world: the hugely subsidised BBC. And it’s my contention that the BBC monolith is distorting Britain’s media market, crushing journalistic pluralism and imposing a monoculture that is inimical to healthy democratic debate.

    Now before the liberal commentators reach for their vitriol – and, my goodness, how they demonise anyone who disagrees with them – let me say that I would die in a ditch defending the BBC as a great civilising force. Indeed I for one would pay the licence fee just for Radio 4. But the corporation is simply too big. For instance, it employs more journalists and their support staff -3,500 – and spends more on them – £500m – than do all the national daily newspapers put together.

    Where there was once just a handful of channels, the BBC now has an awesome stranglehold on the airwaves, reaching into every home every hour of the day – adding ever more channels and even considering launching over 60 local TV news stations across the UK.

    No wonder Britain’s hard-pressed provincial press complains it can’t compete, our ailing commercial radio sector is furious that the market is rigged against it, our nascent internet firms rage that they’re not competing on a level playing field, and ITN, aided and abetted by some pretty incompetent management, is reeling on the ropes.

    But it’s not the BBC’s ubiquity, so much greater than Fleet Street’s, that is worrying, but its power to impose – under the figleaf of impartiality – its own worldview. Forget the fact that the BBC has, until recently, been institutionally anti-Tory. The sorry fact is that there is not a single Labour scandal – Ecclestone, Mittal, Mandelson and the Hindujas, Cheriegate, Tessa Jowell, and Prescott and Anshutz – on which the BBC has shown the slightest journalistic alacrity.

    No, what really disturbs me is that the BBC is, in every corpuscle of its corporate body, against the values of conservatism, with a small “c”, which, I would argue, just happens to be the values held by millions of Britons. Thus it exercises a kind of “cultural Marxism” in which it tries to undermine that conservative society by turning all its values on their heads.

    Of course, there is the odd dissenting voice, but by and large BBC journalism starts from the premise of leftwing ideology: it is hostile to conservatism and the traditional right, Britain’s past and British values, America, Ulster unionism, Euroscepticism, capitalism and big business, the countryside, Christianity and family values. Conversely, it is sympathetic to Labour, European federalism, the state and state spending, mass immigration, minority rights, multiculturalism, alternative lifestyles, abortion, and progressiveness in the education and the justice systems.

    Now you may sympathise with all or some of these views. I may even sympathise with some of them. But what on earth gives the BBC the right to assume they are the only values of any merit?

    Over Europe, for instance, the BBC has always treated anyone who doesn’t share its federalism – which just happens to be the great majority of the British population – as if they were demented xenophobes. In very telling words, the ex-cabinet secretary Lord Wilson blamed the BBC’s “institutional mindset” over Europe on a “homogenous professional recruitment base” and “a dislike for conservative ideas”.

    Again, until recently, anyone who questioned, however gently, multiculturalism or mass immigration was treated like a piece of dirt – effectively enabling the BBC to all but close down debate on the biggest demographic change to this island in its history.

    Above all, the BBC is statist. To its functionaries, insulated from the vulgar demands of the real world, there is no problem great or small – and this is one of the factors in Britain’s soaring victim culture – that cannot be blamed on a lack of state spending, and any politician daring to argue that taxes should be cut is accused of “lurching to the right”.

    Thus BBC journalism is presented through a left-wing prism that affects everything – the choice of stories, the way they are angled, the choice of interviewees and, most pertinently, the way those interviewees are treated. The BBC’s journalists, protected from real competition, believe that only their worldview constitutes moderate, sensible and decent opinion. Any dissenting views – particularly those held by popular papers – are therefore considered, by definition, to be extreme and morally beyond the pale.

    But then, the BBC is consumed by the kind of political correctness that is actually patronisingly contemptuous of what it describes as ordinary people. Having started as an admirable philosophy of tolerance, that political correctness has become an intolerant creed, enabling a self-appointed elite to impose its minority values on the great majority. Anything popular is dismissed as being populist – which is sneering shorthand for being of the lowest possible taste.

    The right to disagree was axiomatic to classical liberalism, but the BBC’s political correctness is, in fact, an ideology of rigid self-righteousness in which those who do not conform are ignored, silenced, or vilified as sexist, racist, fascist or judgmental. Thus, with this assault on reason, are whole areas of legitimate debate – in education, health, race relations and law and order – shut down, and the corporation, which glories in being open-minded, has become a closed-thought system operating a kind of Orwellian Newspeak.

    This is perverting political discourse and disenfranchising countless millions who don’t subscribe to the BBC’s worldview; one of the reasons, I would suggest, for the current apathy over politics.

    How instructive to compare all this with what is happening in America. There, the liberal smugness of a terminally worthy, monopolistic press has, together with deregulation, triggered both the explosive growth of right-wing radio broadcasting that now dominates the airwaves and the extraordinary rise of Murdoch’s right-wing Fox TV News service. Democracy needs a healthy tension between left and right, and nature abhors a vacuum. If the BBC continues skewing the political debate, there will be a backlash and I predict that what has happened in America will eventually take place in Britain.

    Now, there’s been much talk recently of the need for more civic journalism in Britain, the very thing the BBC prides itself on. But let’s pose this question: what if a civic BBC finds itself dealing with an administration that does not behave in a civic way? An administration that manipulates news organisations and the news agenda, that packs ministry press offices with its supporters, that chooses good days to bury bad news, that favours news bodies that give it positive coverage and penalises those who don’t, that fabricates health and education figures, and concocts dodgy dossiers – an administration that, in Campbell and Mandelson, thought nothing of engaging in systematic falsehood.

    Is the BBC’s civic journalism – too often credulously trusting, lacking scepticism, rarely proactive in the sense of breaking stories itself – up to dealing with a political class that too often set out to dissemble and to deceive? The bitter irony, of course, is that when, for once, the BBC was proactive in its journalism and did stand up to the Labour party by breaking a genuine story, the corporation and its craven governors all but imploded under pressure from a rabid Campbell.

    And what is interesting is that this contrasted with the ruthless support for the Iraq war that Rupert Murdoch imposed on his papers and their equally ruthless suppression of any criticism of the invasion whether it involved the attorney general’s malfeasance, virtually ignored in the Times, or Dr Kelly, all but hung drawn and quartered by the Sun.

    Indeed, I would suggest that the intimacy and power-brokering between these two papers and No 10, and the question of whether Mr Blair would have got away with his falsehoods and misjudgments over Iraq – indeed, whether Britain would have gone to war at all – without the support of the Murdoch empire, is a brilliant doctoral thesis for some future media studies student.

    Yes, the BBC is, in many ways, a wonderful organisation. But the fact remains that it depends for its licence fee on the British population as a whole, yet only reflects the views of a tiny metropolitan minority. If it continues with this abuse of trust, then the British people will withdraw their consent and the corporation will fall into discredit. And that would be a very great pity.

    https://order-order.com/2020/09/26/dacre-wants-wonderful-bbc-saved/

    1. ‘Morning, C1. Thanks for posting, the item has brightened my day considerably. I do hope this isn’t just wishful thinking.

    2. Dacre and Moore?? You mean appoint people who aren’t raving woke cultural marxists to head a quango and an institution??
      The left will explode,the twitterstorm will be awsome,Godwin’s Law will be breached in seconds…….
      They will literally lose their minds
      Edit
      Manners,morning C1

      1. As I reported last evening, the woke folk BTL on The Grimes are going ballistic. Their main beef being that the PM has made “political” appointments.

        Of course, a far-left libtard extremist would have been fine,…..

    3. “Indeed I for one would pay the licence fee just for Radio 4.” and “the BBC is, in many ways, a wonderful organisation”. Whoever wrote this (Guido?) is either drunk, drugged or terminally stupid.

      This morning on R4 LW there was a continuous stream of anti-British, anti-Trump, anti-Christian, pro Islam, BLM and LGBT propaganda, An article on spoken English (Something Understood) began with a statement about a suicide bomber at the door and ended up as a poor downtrodden youth who should be welcomed into the home and befriended. Another article was an interview with Archbishop Nicols, head of the Roman Catholic Church in England, who berated the government for not helping the migrants and suggested a permanent ferry for those wanting to come here (and worse). Another programme, supposedly about fly agaric, stated that Christ did not exist and Christianity came about because people drank the urine of shaymen that had eaten the fungus and it carried the psychotropic ingredient. Later was an open fight between the vicar of St Martin’s in the Field and his musicians leader over funding. The Sunday Service was a 40 minute celebration of gay and lesbian worshipers and Desert Island Discs is currently featuring Cat Stevens, better known to the Imams as Yusaf Islam, a convertee from Christianity. There’s more but you get the drift.
      #
      Defund the anti-British, IRA, BLM and ISIS loving BBC.

    1. No obvious mention of this on Guardian website.

      They do, though, have headline ‘Liberal Democrats: We lost the Brexit fight – now we must listen to voters, Ed Davey urges party.’ That’ll be them disbanding then.

      Another headline: ‘Brexit: EU citizens could be shut out of vital services.’ What a pity.

      1. And I. But there is no rain predicted in this neck of the woods for three days: today, Monday and Tuesday. So a wonderful opportunity to paint the fence and hang out the (hand-washed) washing. Good morning all, and enjoy your day. I will be catching up on some chores today, since yesterday I was drained of energy and spent most of the day sleeping. Have fun, and play nicely.

  6. Morning all

    SIR – With the Government threatening to impose ever more restrictions, while failing to provide a meaningful cost-benefit analysis of its actions, I wrote to my MP to ask what she had done to scrutinise the behaviour of the executive.

    I raised points regarding the closure of the NHS, the closure of schools and the destruction of large sections of the economy.

    I received a swift reply that made no reference to these questions. Instead, I received what was essentially a cut-and-paste press release, with the familiar line about the pandemic response being “guided by science”, and the oft-repeated assertion that “now is not the time for a public inquiry”. I agree with that, but I did not ask for an inquiry: I simply asked if my MP was doing her job.

    Given that Parliament remains Britain’s key bulwark against an unrestrained executive and rule by diktat, it seems strange that, with a few honourable exceptions (such as Sir Graham Brady and Sir Desmond Swayne), Parliamentarians appear to have abdicated their role, and are simply waiting to be told what to vote for next.

    I can only assume that this acquiescence is caused by the fear of being targeted by the whips if they are seen to rock the boat.

    J N Sparks

    Stinchcombe, Gloucestershire

    Advertisement

    SIR – Many scientists disagree with the doom-laden predictions of Professor Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance. If they were my doctors, I would be seeking a second opinion.

    Why does Boris Johnson not take this common-sense approach?

    Clare Byam-Cook

    London SW15

    SIR – What is wrong with everybody? We are in an unprecedented crisis.

    The Government ordered the necessary lockdown, which assured hospital provision for all; it furloughed as many people as possible; it prioritised research for a vaccine; it developed diagnostic tests; it kept us fully informed. And the whole country responded admirably.

    Now all we hear is carping and criticism about an alleged lack of leadership. However, the leadership is there; the rules are clear.

    It for us to obey the rules and respond appropriately to the current situation. If we don’t, there will be another complete lockdown. It isn’t rocket science.

    Jennifer Pearce

    London W6

    SIR – Our daughter’s wedding is in two weeks. The day the invitations arrived was the same day that the Government changed the rules.

    I can go to a church containing 30 people for a service, or attend a funeral with 30 people (a number of whom are likely to be elderly). But at a wedding – where many of the guests are likely to be younger and fitter – only 15 people are allowed to attend. Why?

    Debbie Russell

    Grafham, Cambridgeshire

    1. ‘Morning, Epi. Ms J Pearce conveniently ignores the much-reported scandal that the NHS has become the NCS (National Covid Service), the creation of which will condemn many to an unnecessarily early death from cancer and other awful conditions. She may be content with the situation but I reckon the majority will not be.

      1. If the rules said black people must sit at the back of the bus, would she follow that? Woman’s an idiot.

    2. Jennifer Pearce: The lockdown did NOT assure hospital provision for all. Certainly not for people with cancer, heart disease, etc. Even those admitted with Covid 19 were swiftly moved out to care homes. You need to get out more!

  7. SIR – The excellent way in which Dr Donal Collins’s practice runs (Letters, September 20) must suit nearly all of his patients extremely well.

    However, I had to wonder when he said that triage is provided “when an email comes through”, and that physiotherapy is offered “through video consultations”.

    Are all his patients computer-literate and in possession of smartphones?

    Carola Morton

    Hereford

    SIR – I concur with Dr Collins that GP practices are fully functioning. I see GPs providing face-to-face consultations to everyone who needs one, and making referrals to specialists whenever that is necessary.

    However, as a retired GP, I must take issue with those, like Dr Collins, whose practices do not syringe ears. Earwax, when impacted, causes deafness – an extremely debilitating condition.

    GPs’ contractual terms (set out in the current regulations SI 2015 No 1862), which essentially have not changed since the inception of the NHS, require them to diagnose and treat, or refer elsewhere for NHS treatment.

    Once deafness is diagnosed, treatment by a GP, or referral elsewhere, is required – and there is no reason why such a simple curative treatment should not be provided at the patient’s local surgery.

    I cannot count how many times I was rewarded by patients’ thanks when they were able to hear me speak after ear syringing.

    Dr Russell Walshaw

    Horncastle, Lincolnshire

    SIR – I retired as a GP, aged 60, nearly four years ago. When Covid-19 struck, I felt it my duty to help, and was happy to have my name restored to the General Medical Council register.

    I promptly answered a questionnaire to enable an assessment for potential roles. A week later, I received an email apologising for the silence but promising that I would hear something within a few days. I heard nothing, and surmised that extra GPs were not needed. Yet there has recently been talk of training vets to give any potential Covid-19 vaccines.

    I am well used to vaccinating people – I did so hundreds of times each year – and am still willing to help. Who do I need to get in touch with to volunteer my services again?

    Dr Andrew Knights

    Peterborough

    1. Well, Eildon Medical Practice, a monopoly service in Central Borders is now non-existent. Call them and you get a call back very quickly. The doctor who may have never met you guesses a diagnosis without consulting any records and then proposes a treatment. Not up to scratch, in my view.

    2. Never mind the vaccinations (I don’t fancy being grasped by the scruff of the neck to be injected), I’d rather be diagnosed by a vet. They seem, on the whole, to be better at it than many GPs.

  8. Good morning, all. The howling gale continues- but, at least no rain. It is getting boring.

    No news again – though I did see that yet another of the “government’s” top advisers (of whom I had never heard) has over £700,000 worth shares in a vaccine company. So reassuring that HMG gets unbiased advice…..(sarc).

    1. ‘Morning, Bill. Cold and windy here too – and the wevva ain’t much better, eiver…

      O/T: For once I have a recommendation for you – the documentary about Bernard Haitink on BBC2 yesterday evening. I knew that he was a great musician and conductor, but until now I hadn’t realised just how great.

      1. Thanks, Hugh, and good day to you.

        I meant to record it – and forgot. We are to watch tonight on catch-up.

        1. I don’t think you will be disappointed. A genius with music and the orchestras with which he worked, combined with a touching modesty. Such a rare combination these days.

    2. Heyup Bill et al!
      Bright & clear morning up here with what looks like an almost dead calm over here.

    3. Maybe the Oxford virologists need to stock up on shares in Astra-Zeneca etc…. in order to make No.10 listen to their advice.

      1. I do worry for him though – he seems chronically depressed and desperate to do something, anything, to relieve his deep foreboding about the direction of the nation. He will need building up emotionally in order to function.

        1. Our all controlling globalists right down to the smallest detail I expect already have their specially prepared controlled opposition all lined up for years to come.

          1. We can be sure that any Reclaim (TBC) candidate will be filmed doing a N@zi salute whenever he waves to supporters or even reaches out for a fairy cake at fund-raising coffee morning.

        2. Winston Churchill also suffered from depression from time to time. He would refer to the ‘black dog’ which had come to take up residence on his shoulder once again. I suspect Churchill had deep forebodings, as well, about the direction of the nation.

    2. I’ve registered my interest.

      We have this paradox – this brave and thoughtful man is a liberal egalitarian at heart, and deeply patriotic in the sense of only wanting the best for his country; yet he is portrayed as a racist and a bigot by racists and bigots projecting their prejudices onto the innocent.

    3. ‘Morning Rik. Now, if Fox, Moore, Dacre, Toby Young and Brillo could somehow join forces, the generally unrepresented right wing (dirty words!) might be heard. It certainly isn’t represented by the incompetent oaf and his party currently in government.

      1. Right and Left wing are outdated notions. They’ve held sway since the French revolution, but really do not apply to British politics.

      2. Laurence Fox was educated at Harrow.

        Guess who the last PM to have been educated at Harrow was?

        Winston Churchill

      3. Is the exclusion of Nigel Farage from your list deliberate?

        Many people could be correct in thinking that Farage is not a ‘team player’ and would not work happily under somebody else’s leadership. Remember that the conspirators in Julius Caesar decided not to have Cicero in their group because he always wanted to be in charge.

    1. I love the fact that her middle name is ‘Coney’ and with her 7 children living up to her name!

    2. The 180 years ago auto cue error was weird, he’s been a senator for 48 years. It must have been a joke.

      Even spacing the numbers and letters it’s hard to see how he could get it so wrong

      4 8 Y I could just about see him getting that as “For Eighty.years ago.”

  12. ‘Morning, Peeps.

    SIR – You report that companies could be given the chance to rename London Underground stations as part of a sponsorship plan put forward by the Conservative mayoral candidate, Shaun Bailey.

    Mr Bailey must be warned that, if such a thing happens, there will be a revolution. These stations are iconic, and he has no right to tamper with the names we love.

    Hyder Ali Pirwany
    Okehampton, Devon

    If tampering with longstanding Underground station names is so important to Shaun Bailey then pretty well everything else in London must be running very nicely, thankyou.

    1. It was the Churchill Government of the early 1950s that renamed ‘The Festival of Britain’ as ‘The Shell Building’. I don’t think it was an improvement.

    3. According to local buses, we already have a village on the outskirts of Colchester called Tesco Highwoods.
      A C21 Sible Hedingham.

      1. During last winter the guided busway had to take a diversion through the village of Impington, the first temporary bus stop there being Pepys Terrace, after the 17thC diarist, invariable pronounced ‘Peppy’s Terrace’ by all the drivers.

      2. Good morning, Annie. As a (comparative) newcomer to Colchester, are you suggesting that the village of Hedingham’s original name was somehow mixed up with Basil Fawlty’s wife?

        :-))

        1. It is believed that Castle Hedingham means “the fort of the Hypinga tribe with the landing place on the river”, whilst the Sible in Sible Hedingham refers to a lady called Sibillia, who held the manor of Hedingham in the year 1230.

      1. Well done and Good Morning, Molamola. I think you might have triggered a new game in the spirit of ‘Mornington Crescent.’

          4. No whiteys allowed to use the station. That’ll inconvenience a few lawyers around Grays Inn and Chancery Lane. Perhaps re-name Gray’s Inn to Mulatto Inn and Chancery Lane to Takeyourchancery Lane might help them.

  13. Laurence Fox launching a new political party to fight the culture wars

    Headline of the year!
    Gets my vote, no canvassing needed and judging by the BTLs it’ll be a shoe in; LF had better start preparing to be the next PM.

  14. Not So Good Moaning, Campers.
    (Don’t touch the roof!!! Get out of that sleeping bag. Stop being a wimp. etc ……..)
    Would it be cruelty to daffodils to revamp plant tubs and do some planting this morning?

    1. I don’t see why it should be… just don’t leave the bulbs lying in a puddle (as if you would).

      Happy planting.

  15. 324040+ up ticks,
    Morning Each,
    “These MPs should do more to protect their constituents liberties”

    Many of these constituents are on par with the Eskimo who lit a fire in the bottom of his kayak to brew tea then found you cannot have your kayak & heat it, bad A ? not half as bad as the situation we find ourselves in as a nation, currently.

    These are NOT new MPs in many cases they are seasoned political fighters that are on the lookout ALL the time for who offers the biggest coin.

    Whether that be domestic or foreign coin makes NO odds.
    We the peoples in a short term flash of sanity came together on the 24/6/2016 ( people power) and hit them where it hurts that being their rubber stamping lifestyles.
    People power works as proved, putting party before Country does NOT work as proved.

    All the constituencies MPs can have halo’s each bright & shiny but ALL are answerable to their elected in-house hierarchy & lets face it since the major era ALL have been found seriously treacherously wanting.

    If political treachery against it’s indigenous peoples was an asset then
    the United Kingdom would be world leaders.

    1. I pointed out in my email + letter that MPs seemed unaware of the very dangerous precedent they are setting.

      1. 324040+ up ticks,
        Morning Anne,
        I honestly believe many are still reeling from the shock of the 24/6/2016 verdict and many are of a vindictive nature.

        Damage limitations regarding brussels are still in play & new green fields of scam being sought via the pillow, we are told on a regular basis ” they are working their socks off”

        The constituents needs / demands are, as the Dover invasion is showing us in NO uncertain manner, to be of a very secondary nature, if that.

        I always keep one thing in mind, you do NOT go from being pro eu
        to being pro UK overnight, political rubber stampers don’t bounce that way

    2. Eskimo who lit a fire in the bottom of his kayak to brew tea then found you cannot have your kayak & heat it, ©Frank Muir

      1. 324040+ up ticks,
        Evening Bob,
        You ID that Eskimo by name , that’s brilliant Bob.

        Ps I do believe you are right.

  16. ‘Morning again.

    Janet Daley today. I can’t disagree:

    Remember Al Gore’s “hockey stick” graph? It was, in its day, one of the most alarming depictions of the consequences of twentieth century global warming to reach the public arena, seeming to show that the rise in temperature during the previous hundred years was historically unprecedented and would lead to planetary catastrophe.

    The diagram wasn’t actually Gore’s invention, of course. He had taken it from apparently reputable scientific sources. But his 2006 film, “An Inconvenient Truth” gave it – and him as a spokesman for the climate change movement – hugely influential mass exposure. What happened next? The graph was comprehensively trashed: attacked by authoritative critics as “an artifact of poor data handling” and “incorrect calculation of principal components”.

    The discrediting of that diagram helped put paid to Gore’s reputation, but more importantly, it contributed to climate change scepticism for at least a decade. Which only goes to show how dangerous it is for politicians, and the scientific experts whose advice they accept uncritically, to overplay their hand. You may have guessed where I am going with this.

    As I watched Sir Patrick Vallance’s graph with its line of virus cases leaping abruptly skyward, torn to ignominious pieces within hours – by the broadcasting media no less, who usually seize on any shred of bad news with ghoulish enthusiasm – I was reminded of that disastrous mix of “science” and politics that had cost an earlier campaign so much credibility.

    Maybe Boris Johnson will have succeeded in mitigating the damage to his own leadership by not having rushed to adopt the extreme measures that would obviously follow from the Vallance-Whitty hypothesis: by not, as it were, going the full Gore. He has left himself some face-saving room if, for example, the number of “new cases” (positive test results) does not hit the incredible heights predicted (sorry, not predicted, just mooted as a “plausible worst case scenario”) ) by the chart.

    And if the death rate which, as I write, is averaging 34 per day as opposed to the one thousand-plus daily rate at the height of the epidemic, stays relatively low, he could claim a quite breathtaking personal success: by choosing a moderate path between the tighter lockdown advocated by the scientists and the relaxation demanded by libertarians, he achieved a satisfactory result. That’s the version with the happy ending. What is more likely is that confidence – at least among better informed sections of the population, who do, in the end, lead public opinion – in the scientific advice and the Government’s blind trust in it have been damaged beyond repair.

    If “the science” is now, as never before, open to heated interrogation, it puts the politics in this equation in a quite different light. It means that those who are elected to serve the nation have a responsibility to exercise judgement and oversight which cannot be delegated to those who are merely appointed to advise. The country, with a newly sceptical gaze, will not have it.

    That brings us to the great confrontation of this coming week. A rebellion by Tory MPs, led by Sir Graham Brady, is to demand that Parliament be allowed to examine and debate any new restrictive measures that the Government proposes to introduce. This move takes the form of an amendment to the Coronavirus Act which may or may not be called by the Speaker, but the possibility of its formal adoption seems (again, as I write) to be less and less relevant since there are grounds for thinking that Downing Street will accede to this without a fight.

    Indeed, they would be mad not to since it would, in effect, permit them to use any future approval granted by Parliament to provide cover for their own bad decisions – or alternatively, permit them to blame Parliament for failures to approve what they could argue would have been good decisions. Win, win.

    So let’s get down to the question of what precisely Parliament would be demanding. There are matters of detail and there are quite separate issues of fundamental principle. On the detail, there must be an insistence on clear factual evidence and logical consistency for every further restriction and regulation. The blurring of the distinction between hypothesis and empirical data, the sliding from ambiguous premise to presumed conclusion in the Government’s prognostications has become visible to everyone who is still paying attention.

    The Vallance-Whitty show brought this into clear focus and has now set the media – even those parts of it which had been slavishly accepting of scientific pronouncements – onto critical alert. I have never heard medical and scientific boffins questioned and challenged quite so relentlessly in broadcast interviews as they have been in the past week.

    Quite suddenly, there is an air of something like doubt and potential distrust in what an “expert” might be offering. Whole new possibilities of rigorous cross examination are entering the dialogue. How sound is this particular analysis? On what grounds are its assumptions based? How does this “shocking” rise in figures for new cases really compare with previous figures – and how much does it actually mean?

    The interviewers are challenging the experts partly out of professional vanity: because it has occurred to them, as journalists, that they might now appear credulous or naive. But also because they have gathered that this is what audiences want. This should make the Parliamentarians’ job easier but at the same time it increases their moral responsibility: they will have to be at least as scrupulously forensic as the news media.

    Then there are the more profound issues of personal freedom. The first duty of this emboldened House of Commons will be to challenge the assumption that the present emergency is a licence to suspend the populations’ most basic liberties.

    Prohibiting customers from drinking in a pub after ten o’clock at night is merely an alteration to existing licensing laws which are already under government authority. But telling people that they cannot allow their relatives from another household into their own homes is of an altogether different order. Crossing that line should not happen in a democracy without relentless, exhaustive demands that it be justified. That is what Parliament is leading the country to expect. It had better deliver.

    1. Good morning, Hugh.

      I had the misfortune to watch, live,
      the ‘Vallance-Whitty show; when I
      was visiting a friend for coffee, there
      were five others present who wanted
      to hear what these experts[?] had to say.
      I was astonished by the content and by
      the viewers acceptance of such clap-trap.
      For the last six months people have been
      listening to such daily briefings and over
      time have become brain-washed.
      Sane, kind, hard working people who
      believe and follow without question
      because ‘The Government knows best and
      is doing its best to keep us safe’ was one
      comment.

      1. I find that if I challenge the narrative that I almost instantly become even more of a pariah than usual.

        Almost nobody I speak to about it has a clue how few Covid deaths are happening, nor how any of the figures compare with other deaths. As to the projections, they think they are written in stone.

        It’s almost as if they believe that Covid is the only disease that is killing people. They don’t even realise that there are equally eminent scientists on the other side of the argument at all, let alone that those scientists are stating that the government and its advisors may have got it wrong.

        Terrifying.

    2. Phew, lucky we are that Boris did not adopt “extreme measures”. I am baffled as to what these might be. Those who object to the current quite extreme measures are battered by armoured riot police. More extreme? As. in shooting of the unmasked protestors, internment camps, permanent removal? We are one small step from that sort of thing, aren’t we? House arrest, compulsory dress code, laws against congress and public meetings, last seen in the most vicious totalitarian regimes.

  17. What ever we all think on here I must admit that the latest covid case pandemic has been a master-stroke, banning all public gatherings and protests while the globalists destroy the very fabric of the nation state with their economic revolutionary change is pure genius really and must have taken years of planning.
    One look on facebook and there are thousands of what appear to be once decent liberal people morphed into covid fascists calling for yesterdays gathering / protesters to be locked up, denied NHS treatment, given a good beating and worse all because they wanted to register their disapproval with what is happening to their country and freedoms.
    It certainly has been an eye opener for me after seeing all through the spring and summer the BLM anarchists being given free rein while they smash up city centres and topple and deface statues, the police even knelt.
    Our MSM instead giving a fair account of these events have been acting like an arm of the state.
    Parliament has been silent and next to useless.
    The judiciary and security forces in fact all public authorities now appear to serve and swear loyalty to the new order, the masses they are supposed to serve are now the enemy if they don’t obey.
    The world government and their funders have really done their homework here, well done.

      1. I’ve watched the video. I don’t think she is punched, she merely gets caught in the skirmish and falls over.

        1. Why was there a skirmish? Didn’t see one when BLM or Extinction rebellion demonstrated, blocking the roads and all.

          1. Hundreds of XR arrests – no skirmishing because they react by dropping to the floor and forcing the police to carry them; they refuse to skirmish in any way which means that they actually take longer to remove. They claim to be peaceful but are truly the ultimate masters of the passive aggressive.

            Several skirmishes with BLM, despite the best efforts of the police to keep things peaceful.

            Nothing more than a bit of pushing and shoving yesterday… police doing their job, nothing more.

        2. Morning, Bugs.
          Forgot my manners in the excitement. Just been tidying in the gunsafe corner, found all sorts of interesting stuff… and put it in plastic boxes. Now neat ‘n tidy! Time for a beer!

          1. My parents had a Black Labrador when I lived at home with them. My wife and I now have a Fox-red Labrador. The Labrador is the perfect family dog – my youngest granddaughter (18-months old) adores her, and is always cuddling her.

      1. You are fortunate to have the blue skies – it is like winter here in the east with gloom and all-over cloud.

        Good morning, Belle.

          1. Thank you, yes – I was tired and washed out yesterday; almost back to normal today. We will be taking Poppie for her walk shortly. Apart from the weather (East Anglian gloom and chill) it is good to be home.

      2. You are fortunate to have the blue skies – it is like winter here in the east with gloom and all-over cloud.

        Good morning, Belle.

    1. I daresay there would be no punishment for inmates conversing in their mother tongue, if said tongue were Urdu or Arabic.

      1. I remember one of the real police progs where two asians here were arrested and put in separate cells. They thought they were clever as they shouted to each other in their language – Completely unaware that another officer was stood listening to them – and then told them – in HIS – and THEIR – native language – that he could understand every word. It went quiet.

        2. Morning Belle.
          I have asked at the two NHS trusts where I work why Welsh isn’t included on the list of language translations (or indeed French, Italian, Dutch etc) in which they provide information leaflets but have never had a reply.

          1. Hi Lass,
            Still unable to play tennis….bluddy injury!
            I have never felt so unfit ….can’t wait to get back on court.
            Hope all is well with you.

          2. Bruvver troubleshooting, but otherwise dandy.

            How about yoga – D is now addicted (not me though!) But then he also runs and has lost 10 lbs so he is now the same skelebub that he was when I met him. All that good cooking to put some meat on his bones wasted. Wasted, I tell you….

          3. Bruvver troubleshooting, but otherwise dandy.

            How about yoga – D is now addicted (not me though!) But then he also runs and has lost 10 lbs so he is now the same skelebub that he was when I met him. All that good cooking to put some meat on his bones wasted. Wasted, I tell you….

          4. J lost a lot of muscle bulk when he couldn’t play tennis due to his shoulder injury, so he’s still small and slight – but he’s been playing tennis all summer – just got back from playing a mixed doubles match with a young girl partner – he was very chuffed when she said she needed one and would he join her! They won their match today but he said it was a bit too windy for him as he doesn’t have much power yet.

            As for me – I’m still waiting for the table tennis club to start. Maybe next weekend if we’re lucky. Very limited numbers and lots of sanitising……..

          6. The older you get, the more difficult it is to rebuild muscle bulk and strength.
            Unfortunately.

          9. I have found that with the break from riding. My core stability, never very good, is pretty much non-existent now.

          12. Ayervedic medicine is 3000 years old. The Wiki page has obviously been sabotaged by big Pharma. They don’t want you to treat yourself, just buy their expensive drugs.

            You might want to check for contra-indications with any medicines you are already on, particularly blood thinners.

            Other than that. It’s just a food supplement.

            The tumeric and curcumin has also been developed for cats and dogs.

            The response is generally good with improved mobility. Again, check with your Vet first to see what is safe for dear Maud.

          13. Glucosamine should not be taken if you are on Warfarin but is ok with Rivaroxaban, which I am on.

    3. When complaining to the P.E Master that it was too cold he said to run around a bit. Isn’t that what footballers are supposed to do?

      1. I well remember being ordered to run round the school playing fields when they were three feet deep in snow – pick your feet up, we were told!

  25. (Not so) fast food! Warning as pet tortoises are being eaten ALIVE by hungry restaurant rats deprived of kitchen scraps during lockdown
    Tortoises are being attacked by rats who are being deprived of their normal food
    With many of the UK’s restaurants closed, kitchen scraps are not being left out
    Owners have complained of their pet tortoises being mauled by the rodents

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8777533/Pet-tortoises-eaten-ALIVE-hungry-rats-deprived-kitchen-scraps-lockdown.html

    2. I was very impressed, in fact I couldn’t for the life of me work out how she was playing that. Then about half way through I realised there were two of them 😄😄😄

    4. Brilliant !

      I was lucky when dining out in Spain to have something similar happen to me. He played Spanish guitar brilliantly. I gave him 5euro for his trouble. He didn’t have a hat or a bowl for tips though. I think he just enjoyed doing it.

      Why is there so much untapped talent out there and all we get presented with is dross?

    5. I think she must have got beyond Book 2 of Bert Weedon’s Play in a Day guitar tuition manual.

  27. “Ladbrokes currently has Meghan Markle as the 13th favourite to be victorious in 2024 at the considerable price of 40/1. The controversial ‘Good Morning Britain’ presenter Piers Morgan has taken to Twitter to ridicule Mrs Markle. Piers Morgan said, “I have serious ambitions to be Pope – and have more chance of realising them than this ludicrously deluded woman”.”
    https://unitynewsnetwork.co.uk/meghan-markle-may-be-set-to-enter-politics-and-run-for-president-in-2024/

    1. I don’t think you need ability anymore. Black, yes, female, yes, victim, yes. After she divorces and moves in with her lesbian lover and has a baster babe, she will just about have all the qualities required for the highest office in the land.

    2. La Markle seem to think that because she has landed a rather third-hand brain-dead prince, she can rule the world. She needs a good shrink.

      2. When Tom Lehrer tried to boost the success of a filmed version of Oedipus Rex by writing a song that people could all hum as he noted that other ‘art’ films had fared well at the box office as a result of special promotion songs such as “Incredible Shrinking Man I Love You‘ and “The Brothers Karamazov Cha Cha.”

        I can never resist the opportunity to post Tom Lehrer’s songs:

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScdJURKGWM

  28. Good morning my friends

    My best friend when I was at Blundell’s was the son of a Devonshire farmer and he is a Devon farmer himself though, being the same age as I am, he is not working quite so much as he did! I regularly send him copies of the cartoons and jokes my fellow Nottlers post here. He greatly enjoys the jokes but he finds what has happened to Britain is heart-breaking though, as most of us here have done, he has kept his sense of irony alive.

    He asked me to post this here:

    SERIOUS HEALTH WARNING FOR THE OVER 70’S

    It is imperative that members of this age group should avoid, at all costs, watching the U Tube videos ‘ BBC Britain on film’.

    Viewing our country in the 1950’s will surely break your heart beyond repair.

    Thank goodness for multiculturalism, unbridled immigration and vibrant diversity.

        1. I wasn’t at school until 1960, but things were still so civilised and mellow where I lived, well into the 60s.

      1. I was just reading about Pru Leith in the Daily Mail. She was talking about the 60’s. She said she and her then husband did do drugs. She said there was so much of it about.

        She said she and her hubby would smoke small amounts of Pot occasionally.

        One time they decided to try LSD. She said it was the worst experience of her life.

        She couldn’t look at her husband because he kept morphing into a hideous monster. She said she was staring at her arms watching the flesh dissolve just leaving the bones.

        She still wakes from nightmares to this day.

        She also spoke of her time in Paris when she stumbled into an orgy. Guess what happened next.

          1. I wouldn’t recommend halucinogens to anyone. So easy to go on a bad trip. As far as the orgy was concerned i believe she was supposed to be meeting a friend at a party which turned into an orgy. She decided to blend in.

          3. I saw enough of the damage when I was trying to get people into jobs as an adviser. Some were completely out of their skulls and others committed suicide.

  29. O/T…I was making a cup of tea and was idly looking at the sink waiting for the kettle to boil. I notice a big hairy leg poke through the plug hole. Then another leg. Followed by a body. Then it hauled its other legs through. I said ‘OI !’

    It shuffled round and looked at me, raised its two front legs and waved. It was 5 inches across. *shudders…

    I carefully wrapped it in kitchen paper and posted it through my neighbours letter box. I’m still waiting to hear the scream. 🙂

    1. Little Miss Muffet sat in her campus, eating her curds and whey
      Along came a virus that landed on all of us –
      Now she’s frightened to come out and play.

    2. We never did find the big black one on our sitting roon ceiling the other week on a wet day. It disappeared, and perhaps went back outside the way it came in.

      1. Doubt it, Jules. They like to come inside as the weather cools. He’s probably hanging upside down under your bed.

        1. We replaced our bed a few years ago with one that has drawers right down to carpet level – so not much room under there – and what the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over, as mother used to say.

          2. Every so often I see movement in the corner of my eye at evening times. There’s never anything there, but one day I’ll see this nasty black monster scuttle across the floor.

            Thankfully the dogs chase them. Unfortunately one smashed the warqueen’s dresser to pieces and made paintballs of the various pots leaping against the wall to get to a wretched spider.

          4. I was reading a scary story (It…By Stephen King) late one night when a huge moth landed on my bare arm. I did a Ned Flanders. 🙁

          5. Years ago, I was on night duty looking after a senile patient in a large mansion; for some reason, her bed had been moved into the library.
            To pass the time, I read a ghost story (Turn of the Screw). A very, very bad mistake; especially when the female patient woke during the night and started speaking – she had a very hoarse voice.

          6. Hagenhausen Ammunition Compound in 1976 or ’77 was a bit of Deutches Wald with a fence round it and several bunkers full of ammunition that was guarded by a group of MoJos (Mixed Service Organisation) with half a dozen war dogs.
            We used to provide the backup guard for four day stints with one lad in the MoJos’ cabin on a two hour rota and the rest doing either training or getting our heads down.

            On this particular stint there was a book in the back up guard cabin called “The Vampire’s Bed Time Story Book” that detailed several vampire stories and legends.

            At 2 in the morning with the wind sighing through the surrounding trees and on my stint for staying awake as Junior Guard Commander, I was reading about the Highgate Vampire when I heard a scratching and scrabbling noise.
            I absolutely crapped myself. I have NEVER been so bloody frightened.

            Then I finally saw the cause, bloody mice scurrying about the floor in the kitchen area!

            On my next guard stint there, I took my air pistol and must have knocked over 50 mice on the four days!

          7. In the winter of 75/76, I was on one of my first exercises in Lower Saxony. We set up a Divisional Comms HQ in a small village, where the cookhouse was located in a barn. Walking alone down the dimly-lit street for evening meal, I froze as I saw an ghostly figure outside a house opposite. He had a dark ashen face, a top hat and what appeared to be a frock coat. He stared at me for a moment, then disappeared round the corner of the house.
            The hairs on my neck were going into orbit as I scuttled quickly into the cook’s barn. My mates were much amused by my alarm and explained that it was a chimney sweep, wearing traditional clothing as sweeps do in Germany. A couple of them tried to nickname me Sooty, but it didn’t catch on, mercifully. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4af268b13913d111b2eab6b67b4d4ef03d0a0252a01d395fce69dce3fac2e64c.jpg

      3. Nah, it’s waiting for its chance.

        You’ll be asleep, snoring and it will drop straight down, to wriggle and jiggle and tickle insideya.

    5. I know they say in Australia that the bigger they are, the more docile and friendly they are. It was probably the neighbour’s family pet which they use to catch mice.

  30. Russia’s Navalny thanks ‘unknown friends’ for saving his life. 26 September 2020.

    “As far as I understand … the killers’ plan was simple: I will feel bad 20 minutes after takeoff, after another 15 minutes I will pass out,” said Navalny, who collapsed shortly after his flight took off from the Siberian city of Tomsk on Aug. 20.

    “Medical assistance will be guaranteed to be unavailable, and in another hour I will continue my journey in a black plastic bag on the last row of seats, terrifying passengers going to the toilet,” he added with characteristic black humour.

    Morning everyone. It is only necessary to wait a little while and these people are unable to resist the impulse to embroider their stories! Navalny was supposedly poisoned by the contents of a commercial water bottle found in his room at the hotel. There is no evidence of this that would be accepted in any court in the civilised world because once his associates appropriated it, it became inadmissible. No one can possibly say what happened to it afterwards. There is no chain of accountability for the one in the hotel room and the one that was supposedly poisoned being the same. It was unsighted most of the time and his aides are tainted witnesses!

    This of course is still not as bad as the story he tells here. It wasn’t simple at all! According to Navalny the “assassins” supposedly poisoned the bottle with a Novichok agent that has a timed effect. You drink it and hey presto in some way unknown to us 12 hours later you fall over in mortal agony. Even if someone had developed such a poison; a poison that is at present unknown to forensic science, it would still require the perpetrators to arrange the time of assimilation, since this also controls the moment of effect. How this could be done in the privacy of his room by a voluntary act is difficult to envisage if not actually impossible. The whole thing is a Mares Nest, another ludicrous False Flag operation!

    https://uk.reuters.com/article/russia-politics-navalny/russias-navalny-thanks-unknown-friends-for-saving-his-life-idUSL5N2GM2I4

    1. Although this event does not appear to have been reported, I do hope that those assaulted by the police are complaining vociferously.

    2. Why aren’t the police kneeling?
      Surely they’re not treating this demonstration differently from previous events?

    3. Lock up doesn’t help people because our immune systems stagnate.

      With nothing to fight they get lazy and resources go in to other systems. Also by being locked up all day for weeks on end we lose muscle mass and we get fatter – even the most disciplined of us. That’s bad for our health in every sense.

  32. 324040+ up ticks,
    Yet another odious group rustling real UKIP proposals,
    IMO, we need controlled immigration.

    Says EU Wants to ‘Manage Migration’ Not Stop It

    1. Of course it does. Is it the treaty of Malta that encourages sub Saharan Africa to come here?

      The EU wants what every Left wing organisation wants – to destabilise the indigineouspopulation with roots and heritage in their country and replace it with an itinerant, dependent, vitally grateful and beholden group.

      After all, if you move some poor goat herder from Mozambique and plop him in a 2 bed council house in London and make sure he is paid to do nothing, not required ot learn the language, work or earn it in any way he’s going to be incredibly grateful to you, the gifter and not the host nation.

    2. Good afternoon, ogga

      As you know, I agree with many of your points of view and many of UKIP’s policies. Surely we should be pleased rather than pissed off when other people see the good sense of these ideas?

      1. 324040+ up ticks,
        Afternoon R,
        Do you mean plagiarism if used by the “right people” is OK ?
        Please define “other people”

        The lab/lib/con coalition party in many respects used the real UKIPs ideas design team as their own ideas, then castigated UKIP
        time & again.

        As in the case of the eu they now are saying they will / have nailed up tightly the stable door this is after releasing a mass multitude of savage, dangerous wild horses.

        1. But ogga, that’s the only realistic way for a minor political party to influence government under our current voting system. And UKIP has been spectacularly successful at influencing government.

          1. 324040+ up ticks,
            Evening BB2,
            To my way of thinking the real UKIP have been more of a beneficial success for these Isles than the combined lab/lib/con
            over the last 25 years with no hint of treachery towards the state.
            The same cannot be said of the lab/lib/con ex pro eu coalition party.

            I was calling for a build on the UKIP membership from early post referendum as a safeguard,all in my post history.
            All we got was ” job done leave it to the tory’s” then the multitudes returned to supporting / voting lab/lib/con so very recently pro eu rubber stampers.

            Now I believe in a lot of cases we have disturbed lifestyles and a feeling of “Vengeance is ours says the ex rubber stampers”

  33. Trump’s ban on diversity training is commendable – we should follow suit

    Cancel culture has seen propaganda masquerade as facts, changing our whole educational and institutional culture

    ZOE STRIMPEL

    Afew months ago, I was at dinner with some colleagues from the British Library, where I was based for a research project on feminism. The new trans-awareness training course for staff came up. Would I be going?

    When I said no – and that I did not see how my personal views on matters of gender identity were in any way the business of the library or in need of “training” – eyebrows were raised to the ceiling. These colleagues, thankfully, were able to cope with my iconoclasm and the topic was changed without fall-out. But only just.

    This was the thin end of the wedge. I saw how exhibition staff were under huge pressure to celebrate minority history when evidence was thin on the ground, and was entirely unsurprised to read that Liz Jolly, chief librarian of the British Library, recently declared “racism is a creation of white people”. [Well, yes, but by people like Jolly who imagine it to be everywhere.] Or that the library’s Decolonising Working Group has designated a racial “state of emergency”, with Punch (of Punch and Judy) deemed a symbol of “colonial violence”.

    Such preoccupations are absolutely typical of the new normal, in which a propagandistic diversity agenda is not only touted as basic fact but also as the basis on which we must all work, think and teach.

    Which is why, though I never thought I would say these words, I couldn’t help but applaud Donald Trump last week. The President signed an executive order banning all tax-payer funded diversity awareness training that teaches how America is “fundamentally racist or sexist”. The ban is commendable in its thoroughness, including private businesses that take up federal contracts as well as government agencies.

    The genius of this move is that it’s not just a strong signal that enough is enough. It is actually forcing enough to be enough. The US can no longer be painted, on tax-payer money, as a racist state first and foremost. Bizarre, agenda-driven distortions of recent history and contemporary society are not to be baked into workplace education off the back of ordinary rate-payers.

    The impressively lengthy executive order gives due attention to the many ways in which institutions are forcing intersectional propaganda and “awareness training” on staff and students. Topics no longer allowed to be “taught” include suggestions that someone “bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex”. No more “white guilt” on the curriculum then.

    Our leaders should be ogling the order with slathering envy. It is just the kind of step that Britain needs to take: bold, bang on the money and wildly unpopular with the rising numbers of employers now subscribing to woke orthodoxy. For this problem is no longer background noise, or the work of a loony left minority. It is a malign set of forces with hegemony throughout our society, from the police to the courts and the public guardians of our history, including museums, libraries and universities.

    The fanatical workplace diversity agenda that Trump has just called time on turns fact into fiction and fiction into fact, distorts right and wrong, and thrives when trying to get inside our heads. The creep of “unconscious bias training” has gone largely unfought, even though its premise – that we are all inherently racist and must be re-educated – is both wrong and bad.

    It’s time to fight back. Cancel culture – in which people are sacked, disinvited, or publicly shamed on Twitter, because they’ve said something deemed ‘ist’ – has already reshaped society. But it could soon destroy it. The recent humiliating sacking of a professor from Southampton Solent, Stephen Lamonby, was a chilling sign of things to come if our government doesn’t start getting tough – and fast.

    A well-liked and highly experienced special effects expert, who worked on films including Saving Private Ryan and Gladiator, Lamonby made a series of comments in a private conversation with his course leader, Janet Bonar, including that Germans were good at engineering, that he had a “soft spot for [underprivileged] young black males” as they “need all the help they can get” and that Jews were among the cleverest people. He asked Dr Bonar, a physicist, if she was Jewish. She called him racist and stormed off. She also accused him of saying black students didn’t have the heritage in their DNA to do engineering – something he strongly denied.

    These were gauche, generalising and naive comments but hardly the stuff of “hate” or “intolerance”. Yet Bonar reported him for racism, and accused him of “totalitarianism”.

    She was not called upon to justify herself further – her accusation was taken as fact. Meanwhile, a Bristol employment tribunal rejected Lamonby’s claims of unfair dismissal, saying it had a duty to protect its “multicultural, predominantly young student body” from potential racism.

    The whole thing reeked. Nobody was ever in danger. Lambonby was blundering, but a racial, totalitarian menace? Hardly. Now he’ll be forever untouchable, and his students will miss out on the advantage of his decades of knowledge. But at least they’ll be “protected”.

    In the current ideological climate there will be many more Lambonbys. Our government should have the courage and clarity of vision to see that unless this kind of thing is stopped with the full power of the law, as Trump has done, the lines between right and wrong, and between truth and malicious falsity, will finally vanish without a trace.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/trumps-ban-diversity-training-commendable-should-follow-suit/

    1. Yet she was studying feminism.

      When people accuse someone else of racism that person should be held to a higher standard and not one of hypocrisy and simple high handedness. As it is, Lambonbys did not say Blacks couldn’t do engineering. He said they needeed all the help they could get – likely a reference to their backgrounds, education and experience.

      The absurd insult of totalitarianism is precisely what the accuser is guilty of. She wants her view to be the only one.

      1. Just googled Janet Bonar! If I might be allowed to generalise…..having seen her, it’s not a surprise she behaved the way she did! What a horror!

        1. Lambonbys’ treatment has been appalling. From the article, Bonar took everything he said out of context and interpreted the opposite meaning to that he intended at every point.

          There is a paragraph in the article, however…
          “He was never able to question her, despite repeated requests. At one hearing, six governors were ranged before him and one, a woman, enquired: ‘Have the police been called?’”

          What is the relevance of identifying the sex of the person asking this question? Why are no questions asked by males highlighted? It smacks of the reporter raising her/his eyes to heaven while writing the words.

    3. Someone I know who is a university academic will never be drawn into any opinion. She intends to retire at 65, I suspect. The atmosphere in which she works is appalling.

  34. ‘Morning again.

    We eagerly await action by the police for wasting their time, inconsiderate riding/obstruction and perhaps conspiracy as well (fat chance, of course):

    SIR – Beware of driving too close to any cyclist, as some appear to have an agenda against motorists.

    Last week the police came to our house investigating allegations made by one male and one female cyclist on a local estate road. The woman alleged that I forced her off the road when overtaking, while the man claimed that I bumped against his rear wheel. (He deliberately rode slowly in the middle of the narrow road to prevent me passing him).

    Fortunately, I had a dashcam (Letters, September 20) operating, which recorded a video proving that their accusations were totally fabricated. The police were delighted to copy this hard evidence, as otherwise it would simply have been my word against that of the cyclists.

    Roy Thomson
    Sheffield, South Yorkshire

    I fitted a dashcam some years ago now and would not be without it. Not only does it provide me with a fighting chance of defending myself against any such accusation, it also sharpens up my conduct on the roads.

    1. Mind you, I did not expect any police action when a Subaru occupied by young farmers overtook me cycling home outside Bromyard 30 years ago, leaned on their horn while passing within inches and shouted out like a Downing Street TV news reporter “get off the road, you hippie!”.

      I wasn’t wearing lycra, so obviously my life doesn’t matter.

    3. I emerged from a shared cycle pathway with my dog this morning as a pair of cyclists approached the entrance. The chap behind signalled he was going to turn left and go up the path so I moved aside to let him in – his (female) companion, who was leading, swept past and he had to change his mind. “Sorry,” he said, as he pedalled past. I nearly said, “Good job you weren’t riding a tandem”.

  35. Poor old Magna Carta; she definitely died in vain.

    Email from a chum:
    “Talking of Sainsbury’s, I am told plain clothes plod nicked three customers in the petrol station for not wearing masks. Careful how you go.”

  36. DT view…fine sentiments, now let’s see some action from our government:

    Oliver Dowden, the Culture Secretary, has warned public museums and galleries that they jeopardise their generous taxpayer support if they remove statues and other artefacts. It might be a case of go woke, go broke. This is exactly the kind of courage the Government needs to show. A tiny minority of far-Left activists has hijacked a genuine, widespread shock at the horrific killing of George Floyd to restart a decades-long campaign to trash Britain’s historical reputation and wipe the public sphere of anything they disapprove of.

    Too many bureaucrats and politicians have caved to this pressure, terrified by the woke echo chamber. But where the taxpayers control the purse strings, there is a simple solution when a technocratic elite decides to impose its own unrepresentative ideology: turn off the money tap.

    The past must be studied with honesty and nuance, particularly in an educational setting, and Mr Dowden acknowledges that historical images can represent controversial subjects. The best approach is to address this directly. “Rather than erasing objects,” argues the Culture Secretary, we should seek to “contextualise or reinterpret them” – an effort that is far more informative than hiding things away.

    But, of course, the debate around artefacts isn’t just about history, it’s also about power. The power to decide – without having to hold a vote on it – what is acceptable, what is not and what stands or falls in the public sphere. War heroes are among those attacked; patriotic songs can’t be sung; landmarks that existed for pleasure become politicised. It is excellent news that the Tories are finally fighting back against the far-Left’s insidious culture war.

    Leading BTLs:

    william whitmore
    27 Sep 2020 4:01AM

    Best not mention that Floyd George died of fentanyl poisoning after he swallowed the drugs he was carrying as this would somewhat undermine the weeping and wailing over the death of this career criminal.

    And..

    Cyprus Expat
    27 Sep 2020 6:23AM

    ” ……genuine, widespread shock at the horrific killing of George Floyd…..”

    Not in my name. The world is well rid of a vicious, career criminal.

      1. No – he means to use them. To weaponise those objects against the current era. That’s clever, actually. Instead of simply stating they are ‘of their time’ by reinterpreting you can use it continually.

          1. A verse from the well known Rugby song Cats on the Rooftops. A bit rude so I shall hide it behind a spoiler.

            The donkey is a steady bloke
            Who very very rarely ever has a poke
            But when he does …. he lets it soak
            As he revels in the joys of fornication

          2. It works with physiologically old (wrinkly) potatoes in the spring too. Put them in a bowl of cold water for an hour before you want to prep them.

            But in all cases it’s only effective up to a certain degree of shrivelling and you need to eat the vegetable pretty promptly after “restoring”. Leave it in the jar and you’ll get a lovely wet-rot… as a friend found when she departed for a weekend away in something of a hurry and came home to a very smelly kitchen.

  39. Unlike the public wearing masks in the community, surgeons work in sterile surgical suites equipped with heavy duty air exchange systems that maintain positive pressures, exchange and filter the room air at a very high level, and increase the oxygen content of the room air. These conditions limit the negative effects of masks on the surgeon and operating room staff. And yet despite these extreme climate control conditions, clinical studies demonstrate the negative effects (lowering arterial oxygen and carbon dioxide re-breathing) of surgical masks on surgeon physiology and performance.

    Surgeons and operating room personnel are well trained, experienced, and meticulous about maintaining sterility. We only wear fresh sterile masks. We don the mask in a sterile fashion. We wear the mask for short periods of time and change it out at the first signs of the excessive moisture build up that we know degrades mask effectiveness and increases their negative effects. Surgeons NEVER re-use surgical masks, nor do we ever wear cloth masks.

    The public is being told to wear masks for which they have not been trained in the proper techniques. As a result, they are mishandling, frequently touching, and constantly reusing masks in a way that increase contamination and are more likely than not to increase transmission of disease.

    https://www.sott.net/article/438827-A-classic-fallacious-argument-If-masks-dont-work-then-why-do-surgeons-wear-them

    1. Droll, very droll. I’ve been in an NHS operating theatre. I’ve been in cleaner, more hygienic factories.

  40. John Bercow got a slot on BBC Radio 4 News at 1pm to talk about the Tory rebellion. He said Parliament should have a say on the new lockdown arrangements. For once I am inclined to agree with him.

  41. Is the covid curfew doing more HARM than good? MoS 27 September. 2020.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0296dbb0a5ad10101ad9c674db4756ae68b1e9cb066a747a1f04c1e155c41725.jpg

    Hoards of revellers flocked to the streets in their droves last night after bars and pubs kicked them out at 10pm, gathering in huge crowds and disobeying social distancing rules.

    Vast swathes of Saturday-night drinkers were seen downing pints on empty roads in Soho, London, while others rushed to buy alcohol from off-licences in Leeds after the newly-imposed rules meant venues shut early.

    Meanwhile, a huge queue of people formed outside Tesco Express in Portsmouth, Hampshire, as many opted to keep the night going with cans and bottles bought from the supermarket.

    Hoards? God help us as we decline into barbarism. That said it looks as though the government have lost all credibility. They can compel people to obey by threat and sanction of course but there will be no true believers, a necessity if you want to win a war!

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8777387/Police-battle-disperse-crowds-partying-street-10pm-closing-time-new-Covid-rules.html

  42. Hamilton beaten in latest Grand Prix because of penalty awarded against him. Does that count as cheating? If so, perhaps he’ll have it printed on his tee-shirt in time for next race.

    3. He thinks he is important as a rich black man – just like multi millionaire footballer Marcus Rashford criticising the govt and demanding more poor people are fed by us ( why doesn’t he use his fortune to buy them food instead of living in luxury? )

      1. I just watched it. Hamilton got TWO penalties for illegal practise starts. Yet complained he should have been allowed to just have the 2 x 5 sec penalties added on at the end instead of having to take them at one pit stop. Surely TWO penalties should be took separately. TWO stops. He even wants the penalty system altered to suit him.

        1. Contrast with Ricciardo who also had a five second penalty who took it on the chin and said, “My fault, I’ll drive faster and make the time up”, which begs the question though, why wasn’t he driving faster in the first place?

  43. Just in from inspecting what’s left of the garden. Bitterly cold. Funny that a week ago we had lunch in the garden and I was in shorts and a T-shirt…

    1. The police are evil cowards but then we have watched them taking the knee before hooligans so no real surprise. Hopefully the independent police complaints authority will identify the coppers and charge them with endangering life and attempted murder.

  47. Strange – I thought I had posted a comment about the Grimes “Style” magazine – but I am blowed if I can see it.

    It was to the effect that that “mag” was stuffed full of bleck moduls (sic) and I said that the fashionistas had both shown their diversity and wokeness. I also had a cynical feeling that bleck moduls (sic) might be cheaper than yer white ones….

  48. This is an interesting article showing how a couple of independent schools, are coping with the Corona Virus.

    Inside the private schools bypassing the NHS and building their own elite Covid systems
    While state-educated children languish at home waiting for tests, elite schools have brought testing in-house

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/schooling/inside-private-schools-bypassing-nhs-building-elite-covid-systems/

    The tone of the article is very much in tune with the dismal new leftish attitude of the paper but here is a comment under the article with which I agree because I wrote it!

    One of our two sons went to an independent boarding public school, Gresham’s in Norfolk; the other chose to go to a state boarding school In Ashby, Leicestershire.

    Both the boys got similar exam results and both went on to get good university degrees and they are both now flourishing in their careers in engineering or computing.

    So the great difference between the private school and the state school was not in the classroom – it was in the commitment of the staff outside the classroom. The boy at Gresham’s was in two school plays, in rugby and swimming teams, led two school trips to The Hague for the Model United Nations group where he spoke at the Peace Palace, was a prominent member of the debating society, the school sacristan, and a bass in the choir – and when the school choir went to sing in Southern France he acted as the presenter and translator as he is bilingual. He was also in the CCF and the School’s cultural club.

    None of these opportunities were available to the son who went to the state school although he is just as dynamic and intelligent as his brother.

    I find it very sad that the dynamism displayed in independent schools seems to provoke more envy than admiration. This is the sort of attitude which will destroy the country for good.

  49. “Top NASA Official Unveils $28 Billion Plan To Land First Woman On Moon”

    Are they aware there are no shops on the Moon?…..

      2. it will not matter until they get to the landing.

        Anyhow, no one is suggesting that a woman drives the bus.

    6. I bet there will be less mess and debris left at that landing site than at all the males’.

        1. What i like about the women who post on this site is the absence of snowflakery and perceived hurty words.

  50. It was Christmas at the Uni
    My room mate’s all fat and forlorn,
    I think I knocked her up a bit
    During lockdown in our Dorm

  51. The Metropolitan Police officer who unleashed riot police on men, women, and children, in a peaceful demonstration is Commander Ade Adelekan. I could find no CV for him. There are many online quotes for all sorts of circumstances, gang fights, illegal raves and peaceful demonstrations. He says the same thing every time regardless of the subject.
    Apparently he is a very stupid, go by the book type. A sensible person faced by such a demonstration would have recognised that any cross-infection was already happening. If he had half a brain he would have realised that eventually they would all disperse and go home quietly. Instead his men charged into the crowd wielding batons. A shameful exercise in mindless violence and brutality.

    See my comment on memorial gatherings, above, below pic of Dick.

        1. I was unable to read the article as it disappeared each time I tried to open it. He doesn’t seem to have been very successful in tackling London’s knife-crime wave though.

          1. Let’s just say a meteoric rise though the ranks and that he might even be better than Dick of the Yard at being in the wrong place at the wrong time…

        2. In his own words:
          “In my case we’re talking about people — you have to understand your people and their emotions, sociology and psychology. You’ve got to get underneath the problem, because if you start to define a remedy to a problem without understanding it, you might strike lucky, but most probably you will get it horribly wrong.”

          So, bashing heads and punching old ladies is your remedy for peaceful transgressions?

          1. There are several similar quotes/stories in the piece. I don’t know how long senior police officers stay in their roles, but if the Met hasn’t been disbanded he’ll be head before about 2030.

          2. Well, there are number of others. Black and white(females ). But he is certainly on the short list.

          3. Basu might queer his pitch, but he’s counter-terror, so a major incident could see his head roll. He’s slso insufficiently Black.

            I don’t know how old AA is, he may be older than he looks so that too would harm his chances.

          6. I need new specs; I read that as “he’s counter-tenor” – I’ve been listening to too much music!

        3. “Understanding people is very important to me. Treating them in the right way is equally important.”

          (Unless they’re peaceful, white and elderly. in which case, f*ck ’em, they deserve everything they get}

      4. De Menezes fire control medal.

        One year service medal.

        Two year service medal.

        Two laps of a small swimming pool medal.

        Suppression of mass Paki rape medal.

        Being a Lesbian in service medal.

        Three year service medal.

        Being an utterly useless common purpose medal.

        KowTowing to ER and Antifa medal.

        Being a complete and utter kunt first class medal.

        Being the biggest Dick in service medal.

          3. I have Goulash in the slow cooker and am going to watch ‘Thoroughly modern Millie’ tonight.

            I won’t be wearing a mask. Or pants. 🙂

          5. She is. And i am training her to bite the ankles of anyone named Bill. Be afraid !

            She don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are
            looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do
            have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a
            very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.
            If you let my Dolly go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look
            for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I
            will find you, and I will kill you.

      6. Bronze swimming certificate, silver swimming certificate.

        The crosses are ‘surviving the office move of 2019′, project management with a budget (1 bar)’, ‘desk swivelling – 20 rotations’.

      9. Being in the right place at the right time and saying the right things, possibly?

        On a slightly more serious note, I can see what looks like a DBM and a QPM, and the inevitable Jubilee Medals. Not sure about the last one.

    2. At least they are all wearing sensible shoes.

      I wonder what real police officers Like Matt Ratana really think about their ‘betters’.

      2. Dunno, Phil, but remember, it’s the “real” police officers that are happily carrying out the vicious assaults on peaceful protesters that we witnessed in Trafalgar Square yesterday.

        “I was only obeying orders.” just won’t cut it anymore ….. not since Nuremberg.

    5. The wall, preparing for a free kick. But I wouldn’t have thought the two on the right need to place their hands there.

    6. There are two reports about the late police sergeant. One on the BBC and another one. Look closely and carefully at the group photo in the BBC article, and in the club interview video clip look right at the end. Do you see Commander Ade Adelekan’s storm troopers rushing in with drawn batons to bash these people up for not social distancing or wearing masks? I do not. Why is that?

      https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-54317347
      https://www.msn.com/en-xl/video/other/rugby-club-honours-family-member-and-coach-matt-ratana/vi-BB19tslf

    7. How did we end up with a pygmy for our chief of police and a spiteful, small man as mayor?

      OH! I remember. corruption, fraud and nepotism.

      And if there are any chaps taking offence at my calling Khan small – it’s nothing to do with his height, but his nature. He’s a verminous whelp.

      1. Let’s not forget that Khan appointed himself as mayor for an extra year without election. Must feel just like home politics.

      1. In a foreword to The Hobbit, published in 1937, J R R Tolkien writes: “In English, the only correct plural of ‘dwarf’ is ‘dwarfs’ and the adjective is ‘dwarfish’. In this story ‘dwarves’ and ‘dwarvish’ are used, but only when speaking of the ancient people to whom Thorin Oakenshield and his companions belonged.”

        As Khan is thicker than an oaken shield, should you have used dwarves?

        1. No. I thought about it but settled for the correct word. Don’t forget that Tolkien laboured under a heavy Germanic influence.

  54. The American sense of humor….

    “Joe continues to act like the smartest kid on the short bus.”

      1. For those who don’t recognise the American slang.

        Someone mentally retarded, or slow on the uptake. Origin: The buses used by public school systems to transport mentally disabled children are generally half the size (or smaller) of the regular buses, thus the “Long Bus” for regular kids and the “Short Bus” for the special-ed kids.

    2. There is nothing humorous about the prospects for America, or the rest of the world, if Biden wins, I’m afraid. There is so much going on that you never see on the Trump hating channels such as BBC, Sky, CNN, France24, etc. But a good source is at https://www.thegatewaypundit.com

      Mustapha Adib, the man recently designated to become Lebanon’s next prime minister, resigned in failure on Saturday, unable to form a government because of opposition from the puppets of Iran, the Hezbollah terror group and the Shia Amal political party. What has that got to do with Biden, you might ask?

      Nasrallah, the malevolent Lebanese leader of Hezbollah, has been ordered by his puppet master, Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani, to remain intransigent at least until America’s November 3 election. This is because Rouhani is hoping that Biden will win and restore the nuclear deal and end sanctions on Iran, and that the Europeans will follow with money for both Iran and Hezbollah, and Nasrallah can remain fat and happy, until the next disaster.

      However, I think that Trump will win. He has been very active whereas Biden has been spending much of his time ‘in his basement’. People are increasingly disgusted by BLM, Antifa and the Marxist groups causing havoc in many cities and all supported by the Dems. People are also worried that Biden will not be able to cope given his numerous gaffes and his reliance on teleprompters.

      1. What do you guess will happen if JB dies or possibly steps aside before the elections, as opposed to the planned withdrawal after the elections? Can an acceptable puppet of BLM, Antifa etc be put up?

        Finding someone might be difficult, presumably KH will step up and a tame running mate will be found. Rather as Biden was for Obama.

        1. That’s an interesting question to which I don’t know the answer. However, if he withdraws after the election, of course Harris will be POTUS and the dreaded Pelosi will be VP!

      2. I do think it matters who wins. The dems are so weak that they cannot motivate the left, let alone bring the right to believe their vision for the future. As for Trump his bombastic style only alienates,not what is needed.

        Sonomatter who eventually wins, the US is not inforagoodtime.

  55. Apologies if this has already been posted,, but Rod Liddle in The Grimes has this little gem (lettuce be glad) – which follows nicely the gibberish from some academic bint in yesterday’s DT:

    “Only oppressors like a good debate

    Next in an exhausting list of Things You Kind of Hoped Were Satire but Turned Out to Be True — this, from the academic Sunny Singh:

    “I get regular invites to debate on various platforms. I always say no. Because debate is an imperialist capitalist white supremacist cis heteropatriarchal technique that transforms a potential exchange of knowledge into a tool of exclusion & oppression.”

    Sunny runs a creative writing course at one of the country’s worst universities (according to the league tables), London Metropolitan.”

    2. Sign in a shop window in Bath:

      “Never argue with stupid people. They will only drag you down to their level and bludgeon you with their experience”.

  56. Abacus has released a biography. She said it isn’t a very big book – only 47,000 pages.

  58. That’s me or this third very unpleasant day in a row. The gale is still blowing. It is still drizzling and it is still cold. Grrr.

    Time for warming medicine – and the chance of seeing the Haitink prog on catch-up.

    A demain – and the hope for a better day.

    1. Photo 1 is no joke if you’re in school. My daughter has to keep her mouth shut every single day, while the BS flows freely around her.

  61. Does putting a mask on raise your blood pressure?

    Anticipating both an ecg and a blood pressure test at the hospital cardiac clinic on last Friday 25th September (2020) , I took two pulse oximeter recordings whilst seated at rest in front of my computer.

    To ensure meaningful readings, I waited for both stable blood oxygen (SpO2) level and heart pulse rate rate readings (PR) for one whole minute.
    My pulse oximeter displays a plesythmograph trace that reflects the pulsatile blood flow from my heart when measured at my middle finger.

    My initial findings suggest that when my mask was put on at rest, my consequent air flow obstruction meant that whist my SpO2 remained stable, my PR was slightly reduced but my Systolic BP peaks became far more prominent.

    My initial conclusion to the above question is Yes!

    This test cannot be performed with a sphygmomanometer because of the invasive nature of completely cutting off the circulation to one arm which is known to significantly alter the value subsequent BP readings.

    I took both observations to the clinic. My ecg was fine and the registrar was happy for me to continue with my current drug prescription. He didn’t take my BP so I didn’t broach the issue of the effect of masks.

  63. ‘Night All

    A couple of ginger terrorists and a few laffs

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/580563eca2b4ed459661bb8132ba0b0daec2b6ede1975ea56f350c6436f69712.gif

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/53e9180c86ac4b984a183f1ddd4ddac79884f6ec3f9f5c8592de2d0e1a0bb35b.gif

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/119a2e8082712424aa374f0067730b4ffa93c5b8776c286346f8adfdcdc76f26.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/12c1675bf4e7670f3a2e939582b7cc07f81cce7ab61ab92f72fe631376e03ee3.jpg

    Finish with a topical one……….

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/cd15984812cdda1e1c1cc615253adbe7b06c9352ff088a56bb1fcfeae662d05c.jpg

    1. Icke might be deranged but i think he is more consistent than any conservative government we have had in the last 40 years.

      Lizard people may be a metaphor but i think he has nailed the bastards.

      2. He’s a bit deranged. The 5G thing is prolly overstated, though it’s clear that it’s been introduced without adequate testing. But he’s not entirely wrong.

    2. A shorter précis:

      Masks bad don’t surrender.

      What was missed was:

      As the protest wound down and people prepared to go home, the guest-polizei turned on the crowd.

      2. On the live-cast [posted by Rik]
        two chaps were telling the viewers
        that the ‘special unit’ of Police
        had just arrived and the trouble
        would now start. [unfortunately I
        did not hear what they are called,]
        ….and these chaps were correct!

        Good evening, Sos.

    1. Unless we accelerate investment in substantial new nuclear power plant, we are heading for disaster …

      1. Probably true,
        But why should the Greeniacs care?
        By and large they are relatively wealthy middle class morons who won’t be particularly affected unless energy Armageddon arrives.

  67. Just trying to imagine what this mask on, mask off businesses will be like for young people especially, out for a drink, where do you put the mask when off, in a pocket with a snotty hanky, under your chin, do you leave it on the table where other people will put their hands afterwards.
    The more one drinks the less cautious people will be and the sillier they will get, the mask could be on and off ten times or more in an evening, even picked up by someone else by mistake, I can’t think of anything more ridiculous really and more unhygienic.
    Only a complete cretin would dream something like this up unless it was more to punish business and people than for health reasons.

  68. Thought for the evening.

    If the entire population of the UK died instantly, now; the population of the world would still be higher this time next year than it was this morning.

          1. It’s one of the few advantages of being sort of near Lunnon. Fresh Prime will deliver free if you spend forty quid. At present. they’re selling my favourite Yellow Tail Shiraz for £5.67 a bottle, so what’s not to like?

  69. Written before yesterday’s event in Trafalgar Square.

    All protests are not equal in the eyes of the police

    Douglas Murray

    I’ve never been a great fan of public demonstrations. When I was at university, one of the great causes du jour involved a bus company owned by a man accused of not much liking the gays. My generation were short on causes, so intermittently there would be a call for direct action against the bigoted buses. I slipped along once, not sure whether I really wanted to join in. Apart from the sight of a few dozen callow students preventing one of the guilty buses from progressing up the High Street, my main memory is the almost animalistic rage of a number of the bus’s passengers. Unable to be heard above the chants, they looked like flies in a bottle, getting ever more furious about being made to be late for their next appointments. I sloped away, reflecting that if I had been on that bus I would not have felt much more supportive of the cause after the protest than I had before.

    It is a little noted consequence of public protest: the inconvenience you put other people to. Naturally, everybody in principle defends the right to peaceful protest. But whenever I have found myself on the side of the inconvenienced, it turns me subtly or otherwise against the cause at hand. The recent behaviour of Extinction Rebellion protestors offers one powerful example. Outside of a small group of misanthropes, most of us would like to save the planet. [But from what?] But few people were happy for their morning commute to be made even more miserable than it already was by people claiming to feel more strongly about the issue than they did. Likewise, some years back I learned that the thing that had caused me to spend an afternoon sitting in traffic was a ‘Pride’ protest. I don’t mind admitting that, stuck in a sweltering car, I thought things that would have shamed the Revd Ian Paisley.

    In the era of Covid, you would have thought that protests would need an even greater reason than usual to justify going ahead. After all, the inconvenience factor is now accompanied, we are told, by a risk to the public health. Until the BLM protests in early June, we were told that even tiny gatherings of people would put lives in danger. For that reason we all spent months isolated. Then BLM started their protests and the country watched as well as waited. If the warnings had been right then BLM would have caused a spike in the virus. But so far as I know, no such spike occurred. Or if it did, it was too politically dangerous to discuss.

    What did spike was public contempt for the police – who all too readily ‘took the knee’ on the orders of the crowds only then to be pursued by mobs shouting things like ‘Run piggy, run’. At these protests the police appeared to be imploring the crowd to believe that they were on their side. That was understandable, given the circumstances, but antithetical to good policing and confusing, given the claims about the virus that had been impressed upon us for months.

    Then the XR protestors came back. And though the police did not this time skateboard or dance with them, they did once again take a remarkably benign attitude to their public congregating. Not to mention the group’s defacing of public and private property, their attempt to halt the distribution of national newspapers, and their blocking of various bridges in a capital that had already ground to a near halt.

    In due course – and that day has now arrived – it started to look deeply selective, this enforcing of the law dependent on the lawbreaker’s motivations. For it is now clear that the police in Britain and other countries do not take the same benevolent attitude towards all protestors.

    In Melbourne earlier this week, local police did a full mounted, armoured raid against people in the fruit and veg section of an outdoor marketplace. The stand-off occurred because the fruit stalls harboured protestors who were anti-lockdown. Although police in Britain have not yet gone into full mounted–cavalry charge against anti-lockdown protestors, their stance towards such protestors in London last weekend was visibly more heavy-handed than anything they ever tried against XR or BLM. With the anti-lockdown protestors, all the devices of the law have come into use.

    I am no great admirer of Piers Corbyn (though I prefer him to his brother), but the fact that he was the other week slapped with a £10,000 fine for organising an anti-lockdown protest did not seem just. Or at least it could only be just if the heads of XR and BLM (and perhaps all the celebrities who egged them on) had been slapped with similar fines. Yet so far as I am aware, no such fines have been levelled, and so the police – and the law – begin to look as though they wield their powers against people with certain motivations but not against others.

    At present, the authorities say that anybody organising mass public gatherings is putting everybody at risk and that their activities must be curtailed. You may agree with that line, though a growing number of people – including scientists – do not. But what you cannot suggest is that mass opposition to the lockdown encourages the virus while mass gatherings in support of XR and BLM do not. Well, I suppose you can. After all, we live in a country where last week we were meant to go to the office and this week we are meant to stay at home; where last month we were encouraged to go out and this month we are encouraged to stay in; where a principally nocturnal virus stalks the land, doing its worst in public houses after the hour of 10 p.m. So you could suggest it. It looks as if in 2020 you could suggest anything, frankly.

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/all-protests-are-not-equal-in-the-eyes-of-the-police

    https://disqus.com/home/discussion/www-spectator-co-uk/all_protests_are_not_equal_in_the_eyes_of_the_police/

    1. This little piggy travelled to work
      This little piggy shielded alone
      This little piggy baked bread all day long
      This little piggy had none.
      And this little piggy went…
      “Why why why” was I tracked all the way home?

    2. As usual in advertisements, black males shown with white women. White males not required, is what the advertisement says to me.

    3. Who was the last European government who had different laws for a minority in society? Let’s see, how did that end up?

  73. Evening, all. MPs seem to care nought for liberty – they probably think the restrictions won’t apply to them.

  75. Well, there we have it.

    Total worldwide death toll from corona virus passes 1 million today .

    That’s ~ 0.013% of the population of the planet.

    Since 01 01 2020 ~ 40 million have died from other causes.

    Why are we killing the world economy? To get the great reset perhaps.

    1. And just to really cheer you up ~ 90 million have been born in that period.

      Most of those in the poorest or already most over-populated countries in the world

      1. And to really ruin your evening, Earth is not only the most overpopulated planet in the solar system, it is also the most overpopulated planet in the entire universe.

        The fact that it is the only planet in the universe with intelligent life ought to make every human hang their head in shame!

        1. I’m glad you can be so confident that Earth is unique in that way. (if it was, I would believe in God).
          Otherwise I agree with your observations.

        2. If there was a planet somewhere with intelligent life and with inhabitants capable of observing us, would they think that there was intelligent life here?

    2. So 2.43% of deaths this year have
      been due to covid19; I wonder where
      that figure is in relation to the other
      causes.

      3. Oh no.
        Those are deaths where Covid is mentioned.

        Taking deaths due only to Covid and you can divide that figure by possibly 10,000+, if not 100K.

          1. Indeed.
            We won’t live long enough for the official papers to be released, but the fact they were buried for 100 years makes me suspicious

          4. Sweet FA – it occurred in March 1996 – long before they had any influence upon anything.

            The handgun ban – or the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997 – was granted Royal Assent in February 1997 – some 3 months before the election.

            It had nothing to do with Blair and Brown at all. That they failed to review the legislation is the only thing you can throw at them – and there wasn’t exactly a pressing public demand that they should do so. Their faults were plentiful – Dunblane and its aftermath were not amongst them.

          5. You will now note that I’m accused of “sanitising” something which I have not even described. I have given no “account”, I’ve merely stated the entirely irrefutable dates when things happened – ie. long before the Labour government was formed.

            So you can look at the dates and see the irrefutable truth of them – or not, it’s up to you. But I’m not going to call other people names about it.

          6. I came back from Spain to take on a project in the UK in time to vote in the election that Blair won, was disgusted at Brown pillaging my pension, so we left in 1998. I also recall well the handgun ban. So, Blair wasn’t in government, hence my asking how he was involved – unless it was on a masonic level or something like that, of course, which I have no knowledge about.

          7. Even on a masonic level he would have had no influence on matters as the leader of the opposition. The thing about leaders of the opposition is that they don’t have influence; they have to win elections first. As I said earlier – plenty of things to blame them for – but Dunblane and its aftermath wasn’t amongst them.

          8. There are several conspiracy theories involving the labour government and Freemasonic connections, Brown, Blair, paedofilia and George Robertson. Then there is the sanitised Wikipedia account as submitted by the resident expert hereunder.

            Nobody has adequately explained why the unredacted files were hidden from public scrutiny for 100 years.

          9. Our grandchildren might find out, but they won’t care.

            Someone was posing a question earlier about how we have been so easily cowed.

            My take is that Blair discovered just how easy it was to change the constitution, the courts, the Civil service, most institutions, the Universities etc etc with nobody noticing what was happening, let alone doing anything about it.

            And here we are.

    3. No deaths in Shropshire today, according to my local rag, accompanied by an article claiming “scientists think there may be the possibility of a third wave”. Aye, and there’s a possibility we’ll all be wiped out by an asteroid hitting earth, too.

  78. Just got back from a meal out, wasn’t asked to download anything, didn’t take my phone in any case.
    Waitresses wore plastic visor things, wore mask to the table and took it off.
    Some diners put masks on when going to the loo others didn’t bother.
    Walked out after a nice meal and forgot about the masks nobody else put them on either.

    1. Normal people can see through the mist and fog generated by bent politicians and corruptible faux scientists over Covid. The stupid legislation is not ‘law’ but diktat invoked by an incompetent and dishonest government.

      These diktats are unenforceable and will increasingly be treated with the contempt owing to them.

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