Thursday 1 October: Boris Johnson relies on a lucky dip of ideas, excuses and catchy slogans

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2020/09/30/lettersboris-johnson-relies-lucky-dip-ideas-excuses-catchy-slogans/

770 thoughts on “Thursday 1 October: Boris Johnson relies on a lucky dip of ideas, excuses and catchy slogans”

    1. SIR – I imagine that somewhere in Downing Street there are three large boxes marked “Ideas”, “Excuses” and “Catchy Slogans”, and that each day’s theme is driven by a lucky dip from each box. What other explanation can there be for the performance of this Government? It is most certainly failing to govern, as reflected in recent opinion poll findings.

      C R Banks
      Edlesborough, Buckinghamshire

  3. SIR – I recently downloaded the Covid app. It has been allocated to the entertainment section on my phone.

    Dr Robert Mckinty
    Darlington, Co Durham

  4. Boris Johnson tells lockdown critics: There is only one way of doing this. 1 October 2020.

    Making clear his determination to stick to his plan, Mr Johnson said: “I know some people will think we should give up and let the virus take its course, despite the huge loss of life that would potentially entail.

    “I have to say I profoundly disagree. And I don’t think it’s what the British people want. I don’t think they want to throw in the sponge – they want to fight and defeat this virus, and that is what we are going to do.”

    Morning everyone. So few words, so many errors. Sweden pursues a different path that is superior to that of the UK in every way. As to fighting and defeating a virus, is this in any way feasible? The battle with the Flu takes place every year and no victory is in sight!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/09/30/boris-johnson-tells-lockdown-critics-one-way/

    1. The loss of life has already happened. Now it’s the loss of jobs that will be the killer.

    1. Good morning, Rik.
      Each one of the above deserve
      an up vote. I particularly like the
      first one [the suggestion of the
      middle finger!]

      1. Good morning, Garlands.

        We are not a ‘middle finger’ nation. We are a two-fingered (vee-shaped) nation.

      2. Blimey, Garlands! Your interpretation of Rorschach tests must be something else!

        3. The local ex-Co-op shops have the fasces carved into the marble above the door.
          Presumably they were build before 1933.

    3. But Fascism was devised as an alternative form of Socialism to the ideas of Marx.
      In post Risorgimento Italy, there was a lot of political tension that could have caused the newly reunited country to fragment again.
      Giovanni Gentile considered one of the risks was the “Class Conflict” of Marxist theology so devised a form of Socialism where all classes within a country worked together.
      It’s reputation as being Right Wing only began during the street battles for the control of Weimar Germany between the Fascist inspired NSDAP and the Bolshevist Spartakusbund and was almost entirely due to Soviet propaganda in support of the Spartakusbund.

  6. BBC under attack and in a dangerous place, says Andrew Marr. 1 October 2020.

    Marr, whose BBC salary is £360,000, said: “I’ve got to be very careful these days. I work for the BBC and I really believe in the impartiality business. The BBC is in a dangerous place at the moment, and people like me have a special duty to be careful about what they say.”

    On his own BBC salary, he said: “It has always been a marketplace.” He added: “It may not be the case now, but certainly in the past I have been aware that I could have been paid quite a bit more by going somewhere else.”

    He cannot be serious!

    https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/sep/30/bbc-under-attack-and-in-a-dangerous-place-says-andrew-marr

      2. Why are any of them [BBC] paid more than Boris?
        Other channels are available,
        I wonder how the salaries compare.

        Good morning, Belle.

    3. “…I could have been paid quite a bit more by going somewhere else.”

      Not this old chestnut again. BBC types have been making this claim for years. If there really are better-paid posts in the independent sector, it’s reasonable to assume that they are permanently occupied, or do the independents keep certain posts open for BBC defectors?

      During the recent furore about the pay of women at the BBC, not one of them jumped ship which sort of kills this long-standing myth.

    1. Obviously Mr Conway has never been to France – since the UK never signed up for the Schengen Agreement we have ALWAYS had to shew a passport when entering the EU from the UK by whatever means

  8. I confess to being confused,until very recently supermarket staff went about their jobs unmuzzled,now face nappies are a requirement to keep their jobs……….
    What changed?? Are there hidden piles of infective corpses in the warehouse freezers??
    Or did some fuckwit make a totally arbitary decision??
    I think we have a very good idea which

    1. I’ve been carrying out an unofficial check in all the local supermarkets by asking the check out staff how many have caught Coronavirus.

      The answer is always “none whatsoever”

  11. Boris must call time on his farcical 10pm pub curfew. 1 October 2020.

    BELOW THE LINE.

    Bobby Grant1 Oct 2020 4:34AM.

    You think the reaction has been OTT in the uk?

    Just 15 cases today in Australia out of a population of 25 million , all of them in Victoria Australia which is STILL in a hard lockdown with no one allowed to travel more than 5km and all shops retail and hospitality, hairdressers etc still closed as they have been since July – (and were from March to May too) and will be for some weeks still.

    Masks are compulsory EVERYWHERE outside the home – even all outdoors areas. Compliance is near 100% backed by police enforcing 5’000 dollar fines for rule breakers for gatherings at home.

    Wearing scarves and bandanas were made illegal this week – it must be a proper mask now or fines …yes even if socially distanced outdoors if no mask…even as cases run to zero

    Pubs and restaurants are not scheduled to open til late November for indoor dining. 7 months of forced closure for much of the hospitality industry.

    National Airline Qantas will probably not fly for 18 months, all Australian citizens are banned from leaving country, all interstate borders have been closed for 6 months already and the very few Aussies per week who are allowed to travel in to the country or between states have had to go into compulsory prison service supervised hotel quarantine at $2,800 per person for 2 weeks. No you are not allowed to quarantine at home even as a returning citizen – not trusted.

    Certainly no overseas holidays for any Australians in 2020 -not allowed to travel. Compare that with the uk which allowed everyone to have their summer holiday if they wished. We have absolutely no idea when the restrictions on overseas travel will end – it could be years.
    The 10 week curfew – not a UK style “pub curfew“ – a police enforced get off the streets or else curfew – between 8pm and 5 am has just been lifted in Victoria so we are expected to be grateful.

    British people moaning about restrictions there have no idea.

    Absolutely barmy the reaction to this virus. Median age of covid victim is 84 in Oz , 75% of deaths are from care homes, people in end of life care and those with a whole host of comorbidities. Virtually no one under 60 has died.

    The view from Oz.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/boris-must-call-time-farcical-10pm-pub-curfew/

    1. Yet what was their reaction to the black looting mob?

      It’s almost ‘Keep the cash cow under the thumb, let the mob riot’.

    2. Recently someone pointed out that the average life for males is 79, and the average age at death of male Coronavirus victims is 81.

      Gentlemen- for a long life catch Coronavirus!

  12. “BP vice president killed himself after being made redundant because of Covid-19 crisis, inquest hears

    Nick Spencer, 61, took his own life a week after he was made redundant
    from BP where he was vice president of global refining for five year”
    Senior VP gets a DT story,the hundreds of more humble Covid suicides are blandly ignored,boy do I hate the MSM and the Politicians

    1. I very much doubt if the Spencers or any other such family welcome seeing their story spread across the media. Or are you advocating a daily listing of suicides?

      1. Actually I’m advocating much greater publicity for support services like the Samaritans in these difficult times

        1. Here’s one for you.
          I’ve been told, in relation to a good friend killing herself, also the recent suicide of Second Son’s best friend, that there was nothing I / he could have done. So where does that leave the Samaritans? Or, is there something that can be done to prevent it?

          1. For some the pain will always be too much to bear and no talk or medication will ease it and prevent it
            For others if the right help is available a tragedy may be averted
            Human beings,all different,many hide their pain far too well even from those closest to them………..

          2. The point at which “something can be done” comes far earlier… invariably before anyone else realises there’s a problem.

            People who contact the Samaritans are the ones who are still looking for a reason to go on… so if they get help many of them will make it.

      2. It is instructive to see the numbers. Each one a tragedy. And, basically, nobody much gives a shit, apart from a few relatives and friends.

  14. “The idea of controlling this virus is a myth – all governments are doing is lowering our quality of life”
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/comment/freedom-of-travel-must-be-restored/?li_source=LI&li_medium=liftigniter-rhr
    My fav btl
    “I am also a doctor, going blue in the face, trying to argue to
    supposedly intelligent people( including colleagues) exactly what this
    article sets out cogently, and what the public should know, but Witless
    and Unbalanced live in La-La Land and they have the ear of der Fuehrer.
    “Those whom the gods wish to destroy they make mad first”

    1. In the normal run of things Rik one would expect that after this catastrophe was over that Neoliberalism’s credibility would be totally destroyed.

    2. Here’s the headline:

      Atila Ardic: Sexual predator who assaulted two women while posing as mini cab driver jailed for 30 months

      I think they give these totally absurd lenient sentences to BAMEs just to wind us up in the hope that we shall have heart attacks and die.

    3. Here’s the headline:

      Atila Ardic: Sexual predator who assaulted two women while posing as mini cab driver jailed for 30 months

      I think they give these totally absurd lenient sentences to BAMEs just to wind us up in the hope that we shall have heart attacks and die.

  19. Good morning, all. Pinch and a punch. A damp morning – but, they claim, brighter later…

    Johnson still there?

  20. ‘Morning again.

    Someone commented here about the death of Helen Reddy. She was one of my favourites too, with her lovely clear voice. Here is her obituary:

    Helen Reddy, who has died aged 78, was a singer and songwriter whose song I Am Woman became a rallying cry for the nascent feminist movement; when she picked up her Grammy Award for best female artist in 1973, she famously thanked God – “for She makes everything possible”.

    Written with her friend, the guitarist Ray Burton, I Am Woman – “Oh yes, I am wise / But it’s wisdom born of pain / Yes, I’ve paid the price / But look how much I gained” – came out of Helen Reddy’s alignment with the burgeoning women’s rights movement, thanks in part to reading the work of the Australian rock critic and feminist writer Lillian Roxon.

    Looking for songs that reflected her increasingly positive self-image, she found none, she said. “I realised that the song I was looking for didn’t exist, and I was going to have to write it myself.”

    Helen Maxine Reddy was born in Melbourne on October 25 1941, of Irish, Scottish and English ancestry; her mother Stella Campbell (née Lamond) was an actress, singer, and dancer, while her father Max Reddy was a writer, producer, and actor; Helen’s half-sister Toni Lamond also went on to be an actress and singer.

    When she was born Max was serving with an entertainment troupe in the Australian Army, and was in New Guinea. Aged four, at the end of the Second World War, she joined her parents on the vaudeville circuit, singing and dancing: “It was instilled in me: you will be a star,” she recalled.

    With her parents working so hard – and arguing much of the time – 12-year-old Helen went to live with an aunt, and attended Tintern Grammar School in her home city. But showbiz still claimed her, despite a brief early marriage that left her as a single mother.

    With a daughter to support, she returned to treading the boards, singing – but not dancing, thanks to having a kidney removed when she was 17. In 1966 she won a talent contest on the television show Bandstand, the prize for which appeared to be a paid trip to New York to cut a single with Mercury Records. When she arrived, however, the label told her the deal was only for an audition, which they took to be her original performance on Bandstand – an “audition” she had failed, they said.

    Undeterred, despite having only $200, Helen Reddy decided to stick around, her three-year-old daughter in tow, and attempt to forge a career in the US. She struggled, however, and in 1968, when she was down to her last few dollars, an Australian friend, a stage hypnotist named Martin St James, threw a $5-a-head party for her.

    It was there that she met Jeff Wald, a secretary at the William Morris talent agency, and they were married in short order. But he was soon sacked, and for a while she supported them playing gigs here and there for a few dollars; at one point they had to do a moonlight flit, their few possessions in paper bags. “When we did eat, it was spaghetti, and we spent what little money we had on cockroach spray,” Helen Reddy recalled.

    They moved to Chicago, where she made a single for Fontana Records, One Way Ticket, which did not trouble the American charts but did scrape into the Top 100 back home. They moved again, to Los Angeles, where Wald began managing acts as diverse as Tiny Tim and Deep Purple.

    As her own progress stalled Helen Reddy enrolled to study parapsychology and philosophy part-time at UCLA. But after 18 months with no sign of a record deal, she gave her husband an ultimatum: put all his efforts behind her, or hit the road; he went for the former option.

    He pestered Capitol, whose head Artie Mogull agreed to let her do one single if Wald promised not to call for a month. I Believe in Music was a flop until DJs began playing the B-side, a cover of I Don’t Know How to Love Him from Jesus Christ Superstar. In June 1971 it peaked at No 13 in the US charts.

    A couple of unsuccessful singles followed; and then, Helen Reddy told an interviewer, “I remember lying in bed one night and the words, ‘I am strong, I am invincible, I am woman’, kept going over and over in my head. That part I consider to be divinely inspired. I had been chosen to get a message across.” Asked by whom she had been chosen, she replied: “The universe”.

    I Am Woman was released in May 1972. It made little initial impression on the charts, but legions of women began calling radio stations to request it, and by the end of the year it was at No 1, making her the first Australian to top the US hit parade.

    The next five years saw unalloyed success, with more than a dozen Top 40 hits, including two more No 1s, Delta Dawn and Angie Baby (which also went to No 5 in the UK). She was the world’s top-selling female vocalist in 1973 and 1974, and played to packed houses across the US, becoming a regular in Las Vegas, where her support acts included Joan Rivers, David Letterman, Bill Cosby and Barry Manilow.

    She was instrumental in supporting her friend and fellow Australian Olivia Newton-John, encouraging her to leave the UK and join her on the West Coast. It was at a dinner party at Helen Reddy’s house that she met the film producer Allan Carr, resulting in her landing the plum role of Sandy in Grease.

    Helen Reddy’s own career, musically speaking, declined from the late 1970s onwards, her divorce from Jeff Wald contributing to her slide down the charts. There were many more records – in all she is thought to have sold around 80 million albums worldwide – but huge hits eluded her; she retired from touring in 2002.

    She turned to acting – memorably appearing as a singing nun in the disaster blockbuster Airport 1975, serenading a sick child (played by Linda Blair of The Exorcist fame) – and made cameos in shows such as The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. In the 1980s she began establishing herself in the theatre, mainly in musicals; she starred in four productions of Willie Russell’s one-woman show Shirley Valentine, and both the Broadway and West End productions of Russell’s Blood Brothers.

    In 2002 she returned to live in Australia, where she took a degree in clinical hypnotherapy and neuro-linguistic programming and went on to practise. She made the occasional live comeback, and in 2017 she sang I Am Woman at the 750,000-strong Women’s March in Los Angeles.

    Helen Reddy married, first Kenneth Weate, with whom she had a daughter. They divorced and she married, secondly, Jeff Wald, after converting to his Jewish faith. They had a son but divorced in 1983. That year she married Milton Ruth, a drummer in her band; they divorced in 1995. Her children survive her.

    Helen Reddy, born October 25 1941, died September 29 2020

    1. Well, I can’t recall the song. But then MB and I were too busy earning a living and raising a couple of sons.

  22. Good morning all

    I expect many of you were as startled as I was to see the Google logo dedicated to Ignatius Sancho , who was born on a slave ship !

    Charles Ignatius Sancho was born on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean, in what was known as the Middle Passage. His mother died not long after in the Spanish colony of New Granada, corresponding to modern Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela. His father reportedly took his own life rather than live as a slave. Sancho’s owner took the young orphan, barely two years old to England and gave him to three unmarried sisters in Greenwich, where he lived from ca. 1731 to 1749. John Montagu, 2nd Duke of Montagu (of the first creation) (1690–1749), impressed by Sancho’s intellect, frankness, and his amiability, not only encouraged him to read, but also lent him books from his personal library at Blackheath. Sancho’s informal education made his lack of freedom in Greenwich unbearable, and he ran away to the Montagus in 1749. For two years until her death in 1751, Sancho worked as the butler for Mary Montagu (née Churchill), Duchess of Montagu, at Montagu House, where he flourished by immersing himself in music, poetry, reading, and writing.[5][6] At her death in 1751 he received an annuity of £30 and a year’s salary, which he quickly squandered.[5]

    During the 1760s Sancho married a West Indian woman, Anne Osborne. He became a devoted husband and father. They had seven children: Frances Joanna (1761–1815), Ann Alice (1763–1805), Elizabeth Bruce (1766–1837), Jonathan William (1768–1770), Lydia (1771–1776), Katherine Margaret (1773–1779), and William Leach Osborne (1775–1810).[2] Around the time of the birth of their third child, Sancho became a valet to George Montagu, 1st Duke of Montagu (of the second creation), son-in-law of his earlier patron.[5] He remained there until 1773.

    In 1768 Thomas Gainsborough painted a portrait of Sancho at the same time as the Duchess of Montagu sat for her portrait by the artist.[1][notes 1] By the late 1760s Sancho had already become accomplished and was considered by many to be a man of refinement.[5]

    In 1766, at the height of the debate about slavery, Sancho wrote to Laurence Sterne[7] encouraging the famous writer to use his pen to lobby for the abolition of the slave trade.

    I have just listened to some of the music he composed , actually rather beautiful and of that particular time , very enjoyable.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VUJY688nd8

    1. ‘Morning, Peddy. That link takes me to:

      Спілкуйтеся на відеозустрічах Google Meet просто в Gmail: можна запросити до 100 учасників, вмикати живі субтитри й показувати свій екран.

      Looks fascinating!
      ;¬)

      3. Left click on the link, choose ‘open link in new tab’. Bottom LH corner shows small window, R. click on ‘open file’ – Bingo!

        1. If you left click on the link, you lose the NTTL page. I think you mean RMB (Right Mouse Button) unless you’ve reversed them on your mouse.

  24. SIR – The starlings haven’t eaten the elderberries in my garden either (Letters, September 22).
    The wood pigeons beat them to it.
    Alan Blears

    And this is interesting because….?

    3. Morning BSK

      The wood pigeons have eaten all of my elderberries , and I have no idea where the starlings have gone to , probably off to the water meadows and reed beds maybe .

      Perhaps some one will remember letters from the 22nd Sept about starlings ?

      1. Yes, I said that they had buggered off after raising their broods.

        ‘Morning, Belle.

      2. The wood pigeons have stripped my grape vines, but left the elderberries alone. Perhaps they are immigrants from France? 🙂

    4. Because the letters’ editor (Christopher Howse) prefers to publish letters of whimsy than missives of importance.

  26. SIR – Our political system has always, in the past, produced a leader for the time – Nelson, Cromwell, Thatcher, Churchill.

    Can anyone tell me what has gone wrong?

    Alan Edwards
    Nayland, Suffolk

    The answer is simple, Mr Edwards. In the past a far more intelligent species elected far more astute people to lead them.

    These days, the far stupider people who now inhabit the planet routinely elect cretins since there is no one left with any intelligence to choose from.

    1. No arguments re. Nelson, Churchill or Thatcher, but Cromwell? He was a complete W⚓ … in fact he was a W⚓’s W⚓.

      2. Cromwell fancied himself as a monarch, despite having cut off the previous king’s head. He ended up alienating Parliamentarians and Puritans.

    2. We have too many career politicians who are in it for money rather than for the good of the country.

    3. We have too many career politicians who are in it for money rather than for the good of the country.

  27. 324185+ up ticks,
    Morning Each,
    I take it that this johnson chap with his catchy slogans,excuses & lucky dip ideas could be the modern day equivalent of nero the fiddler.

    It is coming across that, regarding this current “in name only” tory party
    the leadership have been successful in forming a string section that cannot be bettered in the treachery department.
    Namely major, cameron, clegg may……………

    1. ‘Morning Ogga. Major, Cameron, Clegg, May ….. fine selection for the string section ….

      …. so let’s string ’em up.

      1. 324185+ up ticks,
        Morning DM,
        Tempting but, Timothy Evans would shake the head.
        Personally I would be satisfied with one days legal incarceration
        after trial.
        Ps there are a lot more head banger’s outside than in.

    2. Lucky dip ideas – yes, very good. While in the nursery Boris is still playing Blind Man’s Buff.

      Many of us here agree with you about the existing political parties – but cannot see what to do when there is so little alternative. We certainly need a new, right of centre party with a strong, lucid, principled and persuasive leader who can galvanise the nation together.

      1. Lucky dip, you say. This govt. is proving to be a Griff ins Klo.

        ‘Morning, Rastus.

      2. I recall Blair telling his ministers to “come up with eye-catching initiatives”. The curse of managementism lives on.

      3. 324185+ up ticks,
        Morning R,
        “So little alternative” then at the next voting opportunity try using the “little alternative”

        Immediate post referendum when the peoples
        went back to supporting / voting for the, (hours before victory) the lab/lib/con pro eu coalition party that clearly showed up the future route being taken.
        The waters of common sense drained away leaving these Isle high & dry, up sh!te creek,

        NOW the cry is “we need another party”

        We needed and had a fall back party that was
        used & abused the very one who designed & triggered the referendum., the real UKIP NOT
        the current one.

        The Batten comeback was the answer only to be treacherously closed down for showing success against the lab/lib/con & friends close shop.

  28. Revealed: No 10 explores sending asylum seekers to Moldova, Morocco and Papua New Guinea. 1 October 2020.

    Downing Street has asked officials to consider the option of sending asylum seekers to Moldova, Morocco or Papua New Guinea and is the driving force behind proposals to hold refugees in offshore detention centres, according to documents seen by the Guardian.

    The documents suggest officials in the Foreign Office have been pushing back against No 10’s proposals to process asylum applications in detention facilities overseas, which have also included the suggestion the centres could be constructed on the south Atlantic islands of Ascension and St Helena.

    Of course the announcement that all immigrants were to be sent to these places on arrival would have an immediate chilling effect on the numbers, it would in fact probably prove to be terminal in the longer run. That’s why the Civil Service are opposed to it!

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/sep/30/revealed-no-10-explores-sending-asylum-seekers-to-moldova-morocco-and-papua-new-guinea

    1. Perhaps a more effective “chilling effect” could be achieved by sending all these invaders to South Georgia for processing.

    2. Notice Guardian headline states ‘UK proposal could create ‘human rights disaster’ Australian experts warn.’

      Anyone here care?

    5. Jan Mayan? Kerguelen Islands? Franz Josef Land? Easter Island? Spitsbergen? Pitcairn Island? Novaya Zemlya? Diego Garcia? Tristan da Cunha? Malta?

  30. The selfish hypocrisy of champagne lockdownism is demolishing our society. Sherelle Jacobs. 1 October 2020.

    Britain is in the grip of a curious psychological phenomenon. Predictably, we are on the brink of yet another populist lockdown. But here’s the thing: nobody really believes in it this time. Not our libertarian PM who can’t quite muster the energy to memorise his own rules. Perhaps not even the politicians lobbying in favour of lockdowns. And certainly not the millions of closet individualists who are lying to the pollsters. Champagne lockdownism is the new champagne socialism – and it is now the biggest obstacle to a sane response to Covid.

    A sane response would challenge the claim that lockdowns are the answer with a simple question: where is the proof that the last one worked? The circumstantial evidence is uncooperative: respiratory tract transmissions plummeted several days before the first lockdown as social distancing kicked in. Major studies have disputed the notion that lockdowns impacted the trajectory of the virus. Nor is there compelling evidence that current local lockdowns are working, as household transmission and hospital outbreaks continue to spiral in the North – or sign that they are worth the immeasurable damage they cause.

    And yet, an elite consensus that lockdowns are the answer has crystallised with fascinating speed. This righteous verdict radiates intrigue. How convenient that No 10’s most egregious error of “failing to lock down sooner” can never be anything more than a contested epidemiological hypothesis. (In contrast, its advice to hospitals to release Covid patients into care homes without testing them is an established fact that leaves the Government exposed to threats of legal action.)

    And how striking that examples of our soviet elite’s lockdown hypocrisy are so decadent, from Professor Ferguson’s forbidden tryst with a lover from another household to Parliament’s bars being able to serve after 10pm – an anomaly that was only corrected after news reports sparked outrage.

    In theory, the PM’s eleventh-hour concession to rebels yesterday, granting Parliament a say on the next national lockdown, lends a fresh opportunity to challenge the integrity of elite calls for lockdown. But as long as public opinion favours restrictions – which as, Professor Chris Whitty pointed out last night, is what many polls suggest – it is hard to envisage MPs going out on a limb.

    But here is where it gets really interesting. There seems to be a stark difference between “public opinion” and what the public actually thinks. And it seems champagne lockdownists are not just running the country, but living among us. How else to explain the conundrum that three-quarters of polled Britons are in favour of the latest restrictions and almost half think they do not go far enough – and yet only 10 per cent of people are self-isolating in line with the rules?

    Perhaps we are “living with our fingers crossed behind our backs” like the “kitchen dissidents” in communist Russia who saluted Stalin’s portrait in the factories and then rushed home to listen to Voice of America. Of the five-sixths of Britons who have failed to download the test-and-trace app, how many have a child’s painting of an NHS rainbow bragging in their window?

    Or maybe people are genuinely unaware that lockdown is pure selfishness posturing as virtuous act. Our willingness to risk despicable new levels of inequality until a vaccine turns up may reflect a shift in the moral philosophy of the Left. As the German sociologist Ulrich Beck put it in his 1986 book Risk Society, which became a cult classic in the wake of Chernobyl: “The dream of the old society is that everyone wants and ought to have a share of the pie. The utopia of the risk society is that everyone should be spared from poisoning.”

    Perhaps this shrivelling of the Left’s progressive instinct into anti-apocalyptic neurosis explains the unwillingness of the virtuous to speak up for the 74,000 people who, according to official estimates, could die as a result of lockdowns. Perhaps this explains the anti-evolutionary drive to sacrifice the future on the altar of the present. It may also shed light on our mildly narcissistic obsession with community transmission over nosocomial outbreaks in hospitals and the winter calamity brewing in care homes.

    Champagne lockdownism might also explain the speed with which the altruism of “cocooning” the elderly was distorted into “selfish herd immunity” when Sage briefed the media on its initial strategy in March. Are those who refuse to countenance herd immunity and anti-vaxxers two sides of the same coin? Both are at least partly motivated by a self-preserving aversion to being infected with disease – whether that’s at the hands, or in the absence of, state paternalism.

    That isn’t to say that we advocates of the Swedish model aren’t selfish too as we call for an approach that conveniently allows the majority to get on with their lives. But, as a capitalist nation, we should know by now that sometimes selfishness is mutually beneficial. And that the alternative is a counterfeit human selflessness that destroys society and benefits no one.

    Never believe a poll in the UK Sherelle!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/10/01/selfish-hypocrisy-champagne-lockdownism-demolishing-society/

      1. What is the purpose of university these days ?

        Is it a convenient place where parents off load their immature teenagers to free up the spare room , no more argy bargy’s .

        Do these teenagers actually do any studying .. How can they afford to party and drink?

        3. Since you can’t get a job these days flipping burgers in McDonalds without a degree, it’s a ticket towards employment.

        4. Matthew 6:34 is “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for
          tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its
          own.” It is the thirty-fourth, and final, verse of the sixth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament and is part of the Sermon on the Mount. This verse concludes the discussion of worry about material provisions.

        5. Ummm …. it’s called being young. Even I vaguely remember it.
          And those youngsters are being diddled big time by the educational establishment. In their shoes, I’d get blitzed.

          1. The go to university for the same reasons we did… to learn a lot about the subject we were studying, and a lot more about life.

            Most of today’s students work a damn sight harder than we ever did… and get a lot less help. I’m disgusted by the behaviour and attitude of modern university staff, they are so withdrawn and disconnected from their students.

          2. Hmm. I graduated most recently in 2008. I don’t recognise your description of my younger cohort of students. It was noticeable that the mature students of my age were much harder-working (not to mention literate). Late submissions appeared to be the norm. I also experienced far less academic rigour compared with my first degree (in the early ’70s).

    4. “How else to explain the conundrum that three-quarters of polled Britons are in favour of the latest restrictions and almost half think they do not go far enough – and yet only 10 per cent of people are self-isolating in line with the rules?” Easy. The people polled are selected very carefully to get the desired answer. The 90% who are not self-isolating are the rest of us who live in the real world.

    5. “How else to explain the conundrum that three-quarters of polled Britons are in favour of the latest restrictions and almost half think they do not go far enough – and yet only 10 per cent of people are self-isolating in line with the rules?” Easy. The people polled are selected very carefully to get the desired answer. The 90% who are not self-isolating are the rest of us who live in the real world.

    2. Roses are reddish
      Violets are blueish
      If it weren’t for Christmas
      We’d all be Jewish

    1. Here’s hoping.
      Given the spavined, pseudo-conservative administration I will also secrete a rabbit’s foot and a horseshoe into my hand bag.

      1. In one of the books I read in German earlier this year, I think it was “Jacke wie Hose”, one of the characters, out for a day’s charabanc ride with family & friends, gets taken short, goes behind a bush & secretes her secretion into her handbag instead of leaving it lying there.

        2. Charabanc – now there’s a word you don’t see much anymore. I used it in conversation with my wife a while back and just got a blank look for my efforts 🙂

          1. The story started in the 1900s.

            If I may say so, your wife probably wondered why you didn’t follow through with a glass of ‘white Chardonnay’.

    3. The UK has been given a month to respond to the threat of legal action over controversial Brexit legislation, the European Commission said today.

      Ursula von der Leyen confirmed that a formal letter of notice was being sent to the UK Government starting infringement proceedings, after Britain failed to withdraw the law-breaking provisions from the Internal Market Bill within the deadline.

      The Internal Market Bill is “by its very nature a breach of obligation of good faith laid down in the Withdrawal Agreement” and “if adopted as it is, will be in full contradiction” of the Northern Ireland protocol, Ms von der Leyen said this morning.

      The UK now has a month to respond.

      Michael Gove has repeatedly rebuffed the EU’s demands for the law-breaking clauses within the bill to be removed, stressing the need for the “safety net”.

      1. Seems to me the U.K. is not breaking international law at all. We are permitted to legislate within our own country. The EU can get stuffed. In any case I thought we had “already left”, so people keep saying. (I’ll believe it when I see it”.

        1. I read somewhere that international law does not recognise the eu as a state, so there was no international law within that arena to be broken. This may well be theatre for the masses.

          1. Comment on Mrs May’s White Paper, publicized by Guido Fawkes:

            And Chapter 4, Paragraph 31 makes it clearer still…

            “The UK Parliament would scrutinize this legislation in accordance with normal legislative procedure, respecting the principle that a sovereign Parliament has complete control over domestic law.
            This means that the UK Parliament could decide not to give effect to the change in domestic law, but this would be in the knowledge that it would breach the UK’s international obligations”

            In other words, Theresa May’s own White Paper recognized that Parliament always had this power, and tried to justify her proposal by suggesting that parliament could always ‘break the glass’.

            Even she recognized that there would ultimately be this safety net…

          2. I must look that up again I’m pretty sure you are spot on Pmum. Out shopping now so will look later. Thanks for that.

          3. “I read somewhere that international law does not recognise the eu as a state…”

            Which could mean that EU migrants in the UK have no legal right to remain.

          5. The EU is not a state – it’s an ITO – an International Treaty Organisation. It’s all noise.

    4. 324184+ up ticks,
      Morning C,
      You mean as the real UKIP wanted ( total severance)
      four & a half wasted years ago ?

    1. Morning Plum – did you hear that Serena Williams has withdrawn from the French open with a damaged Achilles tendon?

  34. ‘Morning Peeps. Mr Martin has found a most important subject to write about…personally I lurve the smell of a garden bonfire gently wafting by on an autumn evening:

    SIR – If the Government is serious about climate change and pollution, it should put an immediate ban on garden bonfires.

    There are millions of gardeners across the land who seem to relish burning leaves. The fires smoulder away for days, polluting the atmosphere, with smoke drifting across other gardens and roads, and creating breathing difficulties for some.

    Put in a wire-mesh container, leaves make good compost – they just need longer to rot down.

    John Martin
    Midhurst, West Sussex

      1. Maybe someone’s bonfire has just deposited smuts all over his newly washed sheets 😉

        1. He’d love living next to me then! We lit the fire yesterday for the first time this Autumn! Nice logs, bit of coal – no leaves!

    2. I’m impressed that Mr. Martin found something that the government hasn’t got round to banning.

  35. ‘Morning again,

    Two more letters generated by the nonsense taking place at the NT:

    National Trust should stop pandering to activists

    SIR – The letters (September 26) regarding the National Trust and its weak response to the “sensitive” issues of our history say it all.

    It is about time the Government told those activists, who seem determined to destroy our past and inspire massive guilt, to shut up.

    Any guilt, of which there should be very little, has been wiped out by the provision of opportunity and all the other advantages that moving to Britain has given many people. Perhaps a “thank you” would be more appropriate than a kick in the teeth.

    Dale Hemming-Tayler
    Edith Weston, Rutland

    SIR – We have been members of the National Trust for more than 40 years, have enjoyed our visits to its houses, gardens and other sites, and had holidays in its properties. We felt it was very good value for money, but will now be cancelling our annual membership.

    It has taken a pandemic to highlight the sad demise of the Trust, which was a national treasure that we were happy to support. But no longer, thanks to politics – internal and external – and an excessive focus on inclusiveness.

    Everyone has always been welcome to visit Trust properties and grounds regardless of race, colour, creed and gender. Thank you, but goodbye.

    T and S Dredge
    Piddlehinton, Dorset

      1. ‘Morning, Bill. I prefer to call them fifth columnists, like all the other wreckers in our midst.

  38. Priti Patel ‘considered putting WAVE MACHINES in the Channel to stop migrant crossings’ as it’s revealed asylum seekers could be housed on old ferries or flown to Papua New Guinea under ‘offshoring’ plans
    Downing Street is the driving force behind proposals to hold refugees offshore
    It has asked officials to consider the option of sending asylum seekers abroad
    The centres could be built on the Isle of Wight, the Shetlands or the Isle of Man
    Migrants could also be flown out to Morocco, Moldova or Papua New Guinea

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8793389/Priti-Patel-considered-putting-WAVE-MACHINES-Channel-stop-migrant-crossings.html

    1. So now they want to turn some of the most beautiful areas of the UK into New Alcatraz.

      Makes sense from the globalist destroy everything perspective.

    3. 324185+ up ticks,
      Afternoon TB,
      She would say that wouldn’t she, regarding wave machines,
      She would say that wouldn’t she regarding new Guinea,
      She would say that wouldn’t she regarding the IOW,
      She would say that wouldn’t she regarding the Shetlands,
      Fodder for fools, no action EVER ever taken, none ever needed.
      The wretch cameron was the best patter merchant, he actually sent out what would befall us on leaving the eu
      in a written verbal warning us, and charged us for it.

  39. SIR – A couple of years ago, when Theresa May was making a hash of things, I joined the Conservative Party with the intention of voting for Boris Johnson when the occasion arose.

    This I duly did and was happy with my decision, until he was struck down with Covid-19. Since then, he has not seemed himself. May I respectfully ask him to take a break?

    Iain Duncan Smith would make a great caretaker with Rishi Sunak by his side at No 11.

    Janet Milliken
    Folkestone, Kent

    The left is already smouldering at the possibility of Paul Dacre at OFCOM and Charles Moore at the BBC. IDS as PM would see it combust spectacularly. If only for the possibility of that, it’s a great suggestion.

    1. Boris Johnson should concentrate on getting an unequivocal and ‘good for Britain’ Brexit: that would be a very commendable legacy to leave behind him. He could then retire having achieved something of value that both Evil May and Spiv Nouveau Cameron have failed to do.

      In the meantime he should leave the Covid problem to somebody else and have nothing more to do with it.

  40. From the Tellygraff…encouraging, but I’ll only believe it when it happens! If Priti Useless is involved then it probably won’t:

    Asylum seekers who enter the UK from Europe face being rejected after Brexit under a shake-up planned by Priti Patel.

    The Home Secretary is proposing legal changes that would mean asylum claims by migrants who come through the EU and enter the UK illegally will be deemed “inadmissible” once the UK finally leaves the EU at the end of this year.

    The move follows the surge in migrants crossing the Channel on small boats and concern that the immigration and asylum system is “not fit for purpose” with lawful attempts to return applicants to other EU nations “frustrated by repeated legal claims” on human rights or other grounds.

    The new legal post-Brexit framework would replace the Dublin agreement under which the EU country through which an asylum-seeker first enters the EU is judged responsible for examining their claim.

    “If you come through the EU, an asylum claim would be inadmissible because you should have claimed it in the first country you entered,” said a source.

    Extending similar rules to migrants who have illegally entered the UK from non EU countries is also understood to be “on the table,” although final decisions on the proposed shake-up have not been taken.

    It comes as it emerged that migrants seeking asylum in Britain could be processed offshore under plans being developed by Ms Patel.

    Officials have ruled out Ascension Island and St Helena as impractical because of their distance from the UK but the Home Secretary is still considering options for a third country where asylum seekers could be held while their applications are processed.

    Sources close to Ms Patel countered criticism of the proposal, which would require legislation, by citing similar plans by Tony Blair when he faced a surge in illegal migrants crossing the channel on lorries and ferries in 2003.

    His transit processing centres in “protected zones in third countries were designed to “deter those who enter the EU illegally and make unfounded asylum applications.”

    A Government source said: “We are looking at offshoring but key will be finding an appropriate location.”

    Other options considered included Moldova, Morocco and Papua New Guinea. The Government is also considering converting disused ferries into centres moored off the coast where asylum applicants could be processed, according to The Times

    The measures are likely to form part of Ms Patel’s proposed “fair borders bill” – which could be flagged as early as this Sunday when the Home Secretary delivers her keynote speech to the virtual Conservative conference.

    The bill is also expected to include plans to stop people drawing out the asylum application process by making them declare their grounds for refugee status when they apply, rather than being able to submit new reasons later.

    Ms Patel reportedly told Tory MPs on a Zoom conference call six weeks ago that the asylum system was “broken” as she promised to introduce laws that would “send the left into meltdown”.

    She claimed the system was being “exploited by leftie Labour-supporting lawyers” doing everything they could to stop the Government removing people. Two weeks later a deportation flight returning 23 illegal migrants to Spain was halted after last-minute legal actions by human rights lawyers.

    Immigration minister Chris Philp signalled the changes when asked in the Commons if the new bill would “contain provisions that those who enter the UK illegally not being able to subsequently apply to stay in this country.”

    He said the asylum and immigration enforcement system was “not fit for purpose”.

    “We are often frustrated by repeated vexatious legal claims often at the last minute with the express intention of frustrating the proper application of the law,” he said.

    “I can confirm we are working at pace on legislative options in the way he describes and everything is on the table.”

    Ms Patel on Wednesday criticised other EU nations for “endless legal barriers” that prevented the removal and return of asylum seekers even where the UK had fingerprint or other evidence that they should have or did apply for asylum first in other European countries.

    “We have EU states themselves not following the European Union’s Dublin Regulation and not taking back people who have been deemed to be found coming through those countries in the first place,” she told the Blue Collar Conservatism Conference in Keighley.

    1. The lawyers who raise these ‘legal challenges’ should be required to house those they represent and provide their services pro bono

          1. Willy Shakespeare had the right idea: Dick the butcher “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

    2. …Ms Patel’s proposed “fair borders bill…”

      Is more law really necessary? How using that which exists and undoing that which hinders its implementation?

    3. Yeah, sure. Ms Patel is perfectly well aware of “the Dublin agreement under which the EU country through which an asylum-seeker first enters the EU is judged responsible for examining their claim“.
      The present influx is a result of her and her department not acting on the Dublin Agreement and failing to take immediate effective action to boot the incomers straight back. There should be a refusal to allow cases to be brought to Court on behalf of anyone whose presence in the country is illegal or irregular.
      The complete abolition of Legal Aid would not hurt either.

    4. Why only ‘after Brexit’?

      Why not now? international law won’t change. They’re not EU citizens. They’re illegal immigrants.

    5. Has she stepped off the box that raised her enough to peer over her neighbours’ fence so she could count the numbers in the house?

  41. Russian hackers are responsible for HALF of all nation-state cyber-attacks targeting everything from elections to the Olympics, Microsoft data reveals. 1 October 2020.

    More than half of nation-state cyber attacks in the last year have originated from Russia, Microsoft has revealed in a new report.

    According to the firm’s annual Digital Defense Report, 52 per cent of state-sponsored hacking attempts from July 2019 and June 2020 were Russian in origin.

    Exactly a quarter during this time period came from Iran, 12 per cent from China and the remaining 11 per cent from North Korea and other countries.

    Well in my book that adds up to pretty near 100%, so my question is; what are we doing? Have the CIA, Mossad and Mi6 retired? Are they now defunct? Have the nations that invented the stuxnet virus withdrawn into obscurity? Obviously not! This is a piece of truly childish propaganda!

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8789035/Microsoft-Russia-nation-state-cyber-attacks.html

    1. ‘Morning, Minty. I hardly think that GCHQ are going to publish what they are up to by way of retaliation.

    2. Hmmm. What this means is that of the recorded information the majority originates from Russian IPs.

      Heck, that’s not difficult at all.

      What can we do about it? Nothing. If your PC gets scanned – my little network reports 30 or forty or so banging on the door a day – it’s irrelevant. It’s the ones that actually do malicious damage that matter.

  42. Douglas Murray
    At last, the Conservatives are showing some fight in the culture war

    The appointments of Paul Dacre and Charles Moore could be a turning point
    From magazine issue: 3 October 2020

    Abeautiful noise rang out last week in the wake of the news that the government is considering Charles Moore to become the new chairman of the BBC and Paul Dacre to be the head of the broadcasting watchdog Ofcom. The noise was the sound of the British left wailing that toys they thought were theirs alone might now (under a Conservative government) finally go to identifiable conservatives.

    The former editor of the Guardian Alan Rusbridger shrieked that ‘this is what an oligarchy looks like’. This and similar tweets were presumably sent from the lodgings of the Oxford college that Rusbridger was made principal of five years ago. Others who screamed themselves sick included BBC employees who briefed that Moore’s appointment ‘would shatter morale. People will leave.’ For there can be no greater way to refute accusations of institutional leftism in the BBC than for the corporation’s employees to threaten to resign en masse in response to a conservative appointment. Elsewhere, Have I Got News For You tweeted that this would be the end for the BBC. Which is as funny a joke as that show has mustered in the present century.

    Of course, there is no certainty Moore or Dacre will take up either job. And even less certainty that if they do so they will be able to turn around the relevant organisations. But the announcements are a good sign because they suggest that the Conservatives might finally be showing some fight in the culture and institutional wars that conservatives have traditionally lost.

    It is a surprise. For after all, a year into office there had been very few indications that the Johnson government would be any more stalwart in appointing conservatives than its two predecessors.

    David Cameron’s government managed to see William Shawcross appointed as the chair of the Charity Commission and Andrew Roberts as a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery. Theresa May fared less well. The attempt to put Toby Young on to a higher-education quango ground British politics to a near standstill until Young withdrew his candidacy. The same government’s efforts to put Roger Scruton into an unpaid role heading an advisory commission on buildings led to even greater pain. In recent years some of us had given up on the idea that the Conservatives could appoint any conservatives into positions in public life.

    As such, the Moore and Dacre appointments would be a much-needed volley — one that would demonstrate that the culture wars can no longer be fought and won solely by the radical left. In the wider country there are signs of exasperation over how one-sided the cultural battle has been. Last weekend the actor Laurence Fox announced the setting-up of a new political party — Reclaim — to push back against the left’s stranglehold over every cultural and other institution in this country. Though it is unlikely to pose much electoral threat to the Conservatives, it could help remind them that assaults on our history and culture are not viewed with defeatism or equanimity by all of the British public.

    Still, the question is not whether Dacre and Moore can be appointed, but what support they might get and what other phalanxes might be brought in behind them. How, in short, to ensure that they are not one-offs but part of a concerted march back through the institutions. There is plenty to do.

    For noble though it is to focus on the BBC, huge amounts of the cultural and political weather in this country are set not by the BBC but by the people whom they report on and go to. In quango after quango it is the same old story. The Victims’ Commissioner, Vera Baird, for instance, is a former Labour MP whose every statement and action fits the old Blairite agenda. Yet it was the Conservative government that appointed her to her current position in June 2019.

    But it isn’t just about individuals. It is about the cultural attitude currently embedded at the roots of the civil service and every government appointment. When the Blair government instituted the ‘diversity’ agenda the Conservatives went along with it. Cameroon Conservatives saw it not as a right or left issue but simply a forwards or backwards issue: a progressive versus regressive one. That thought-rot now runs deeper than almost any other aspiration in the civil service. Indeed when permanent secretaries write their objectives for their roles, the one thing they all have in common — far above the wellbeing of the country — is the promotion of the ‘diversity agenda’.

    There are some signs that the chessboard is being rearranged. The dismissal of Jonathan Slater from his position as permanent secretary at the Department of Education was one good sign. Slater was, and still is, one of the great twitterers about diversity. But it is not enough just to change the figures on the board. It is necessary to change the game. Slater may have gone, but his former colleagues still find themselves in the midst of a pandemic and looming depression being sent on ‘diversity training’ and racial bias awareness training, as though these gods sit above all others as the goal and indeed purpose of the British state.

    And then there is the issue of the ‘pilgrims’ — publicly funded workers who, though paid for by the taxpayer, double up as union officers and organisers. Like so much else, the Cameron government ducked dealing with this scandalous arrangement. But if the Johnson administration wants not just to save money but to demonstrate a real change in the wind, it would sweep all these people off the public pay roll.

    The last Labour government rigged almost every institution in this country with enormous craft and cunning. Even now, from the National Lottery Fund to the National Trust, we have institution after institution in this country run by people whose interests are opposed to those of the general public, and aspiring more than anything else to the hideous, divisive and now clearly failing ‘woke’ agenda. Dacre and Moore are good early warning shots. But if the Johnson government wants to do something meaningful, it should not just follow through on their appointments; it should follow them up with a fusillade every bit as relentless and long-lasting as the Labour one, the repercussions of which this country still suffers from.

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/at-last-the-conservatives-are-showing-some-fight-in-the-culture-war#comment-5092494045

    1. “Have I Got News For You tweeted that this would be the end for the BBC. Which is as funny a joke as that show has mustered in the present century.” All too true sadly, I can remember when HIGNFY was actually quite amusing but when it swerved even further left, I gave up and I haven’t missed it!

      1. HIGNFY has become tedious in the extreme. To spend most of the show sneering at President Trump is tiresome.

        At least with Graham Norton he gets it over with in the opening monologue.

      2. Hislop is an opinionated and prejudiced little twerp. He used to be funny but now that he has gone so woke he is completely incapable of being an unbiased and objective satirist and should be sacked for not doing his job.

      3. We used to watch it every Friday evening. Then we realised that we hadn’t bothered for some time; not so much a conscious decision as life passed it by.

    2. Yet diversity is NOT a step forward. It is a clear, obvious step backward.

      Firstly because it enforces division. They’re different, we’re bringing them here, we’re good. It doesn’t recognise the values of the individuals in the group, it’s just a label.

      Then there’s the scatter gun – more grapeshot – approach to it. Anyone from anywhere must be brought here to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’.

      Stuff the humanitarian harm, the unhappiness, the enforced welfare support, the intentional, deliberate differentiation of the individual – promote them simply because they’re ‘different’. Make that the only relevant factor.

      It just brought in people wanting, not interested in giving. It didn’t add to society, it detracted. Worse – and no one ever cares about this – it diminished the incomer. It stopped them being Imran, engineer and just made them Imran, Muslim. Yet the practice was pursued vigorously simply because the screaming from the Left made NOT wearing the chains ‘waycist’.

      All for the benefit of petty, self righteous, egotistical, arrogant, snobbish, isolated and privileged Lefties a generation of immigrants were reduced to a label. The rest of us had to pick up the pieces of insults, abuse, rape, knife crime, theft, drugs and so on and so on and all that enforced diversity did was create division but should you raise the obvious truth you were called a bigot by those unthinkingly forcing their agenda on us.

      The Left: progressively forcing us back for their own ego.

  43. Millions of tons of water are wasted daily.

    SIR – You report (September 30) that dual-flush lavatories “may waste more water than they save”. Users also find the two buttons confusing.

    I am glad that these problems are finally coming to light. I have to watch the flush on my lavatory like a hawk to ensure that it has not stuck. The old siphon system, by contrast, doesn’t leak, and can be made to flush for only as long as the handle is held down.

    Gavin R Bishop
    Newton Abbot, Devon

    SIR – I was not surprised to learn of the enormous daily waste of water due to poorly designed flushing systems.

    Contributing to this is the EU directive some years ago that lavatory cisterns should be reduced in size. The result is that many of them fail to do their job on the first flush, and must therefore be flushed again.

    G M E Barber
    Sudbury, Suffolk

    SIR – The main problem with dualflush lavatory cisterns is that they are often cheap imitations of the original designs and are fitted by amateurs.
    When they go wrong, customers fiddle with them, which makes things worse. You get what you pay for.

    Kevin Pearson
    Director, Total Pressure Ltd Newbury, Berkshire

    SIR — There are far more profligate wastes of clean, expensive, potable water than dual-flush lavatories (Letters, October 1).

    Individuals who routinely wash and clean their teeth under constantly running water; people who take a bath instead of a shower; those who shower for far too long; the reckless who water their lawns or wash their cars during a drought; and, worst of all, the irresponsible who insist on doing the washing-up under a running tap.

    Clean water is a costly luxury that far too many take for granted. Maybe they would reconsider if it was taken away from them.

    A Grizzly B
    NoTTLer Pest.

    1. All these people overlooked the never-ending waste from leaks which water companies seem never to get round to repairing.

      A month ago, there was a burst main in Fulmodeston. It ran, unchecked for three days – even though men from Anglian Water had come out and “inspected” it. Millions of gallons were lost.

      1. A French poo in the shower saves another. You have to push it down the hole with your big toe, though.

      2. Some brewers pee into bottles and glasses and serve it to customers under the name of ‘lager’.

        2. You’ve never tried Affligem? Other Belgian beers (apart from Stella Artois) are available.

    4. Oh, dang those people showering for more than the allocated and acceptable 13 seconds.

      I’ll shower for as long as I want, I’ll be in there for four hours if I choose. Yes, it is a cost. A luxury? No. We’ve had clean water in the UK for decades. We built the infrastructure, the machinery and the mechanisms to clean it. Of course, with the ecomentalism going around that’s likely to change as demand outstrips supply, but when sewage runs from a politicians tap they might notice. Until then we are where we are.

      1. With that sort of attitude to a precious resource on an already over-populated planet, your selfish mindset is simply a part of the problem.

          1. To crush an Aston Martin is a complete waste of resources. Confiscate by all means then sell at auction.

          2. Police officers are obliged to drive (or tow) abandoned vehicles away from where they are left, especially if their presence endangers other road users.

            I never had the chance to drive an abandoned Aston Martin (nor a Rolls Royce, nor a Jensen CV8). All I got to drive was a bloody Renault 4! Those stealing it were obviously as confused by the gear selector lever as I was.

          5. I know the choke thing is a bit of a cliche but I actually saw that happen when I was on a teenager on a holiday job at a local garage.

          8. During the early ’70s when I was in the habit of hitchhiking between Maidstone & Wooler, I twice had a lift off the same Jensen!
            First time I was picked up by the delivery driver, 2nd time by the owner!

          13. Wibbers does have a point.
            I am heartily sick of being blamed for all the world’s failings.
            All I’ve tried to do is earn a living, bring up two sons (TWO, not twelve like all too many 3rd worlders) to be responsible citizens and try to be an asset rather than liability to me and mine.
            And for this I’m castigated if I have a bath or buy a sodding tin of tuna.
            Quite frankly, I’ve bloody well had enough.

          14. Now you know how I feel when people on here, you included, keep having a routine pop at the police.

          15. You are no longer a policeman, Grizz. Today’s force service is an entirely different matter. I’m not saying there are no good police, but the majority (and their “superiors”) seem to be doing their best to ruin their reputation. Don’t take it personally.

          16. I know. I know. However, my loyalties remain and I simply get pissed off by constantly hearing people moan about those doing a difficult job of which they know nothing about. I am as pissed off about what has become of the modern version of the job I used to love as much as anyone else.

            To have to read constant carping from keyboard warriors — who never let on what job they do (or used to do) but who take great delight in constantly taking the piss out of those of us who are more open and less cowardly and curmudgeonly — gets right on my tits.

            I swore an oath of allegiance to the Crown all those years ago. I have never rescinded it, nor shall I ever. I am what I am and I shall never make any apology for that.

          17. Some of us like what you are, George!
            It is hard, though, to see the antics of today’s coppers when I was brought up in the real (ie, not Blunkett) family half a century ago. I’m glad my father and pretty much all of his peers are no longer around to witness it.

          18. Thanks, John. I certainly could not dream of doing the job today under what now passes for “management”.

          19. Many of the current force service are not of the same calibre.
            Especially at the top.

        3. So be it. It’s my money.

          I didn’t want – nor was I consulted – on the population to be increased by 40% in 20 years. Nor was I asked if I believed that not building reservoirs was rational, nor that energy use should be forced down to meet an irrelevant target, nor that materials be wasted on inefficient, ineffective wind mills.

          As regards an over populated planet – that’s not my responsibility. While we’re forced to prop up the third world to keep them alive instead of giving them the tools and training to do it for themselves why is that remotely down to me?

          If Joe Warlord pops along and nicks the tractor we’ve given them to dig trenches and the pipes are stolen and sold back to us for their metals again, why is that our responsibility?

          1. Hey, calm down! Put all that excess energy to use by campaigning to be the next PM and get all those problems you mention sorted out.

          2. Maybe. I didn’t like the selfish mindset. I’m quite altruistic – too much so.

            Many of the things we need are because of EU regulation. As with waste, they’ve caused nothing but harm. The infuriating thing is, no one cares about those.

            As a family we try – we’ve a daisy chained water container – 2 250 litre drum things for the horsies and when the dogs are outside they’ve a pedal lark for them and I’d really like to get solar panels stuck on the roof and a powerwall battery thing, especially during the summer to reduce our energy costs but money’s finite.

        4. So be it. It’s my money.

          I didn’t want – nor was I consulted – on the population to be increased by 40% in 20 years. Nor was I asked if I believed that not building reservoirs was rational, nor that energy use should be forced down to meet an irrelevant target, nor that materials be wasted on inefficient, ineffective wind mills.

          As regards an over populated planet – that’s not my responsibility. While we’re forced to prop up the third world to keep them alive instead of giving them the tools and training to do it for themselves why is that remotely down to me?

          If Joe Warlord pops along and nicks the tractor we’ve given them to dig trenches and the pipes are stolen and sold back to us for their metals again, why is that our responsibility?

      1. Oh, Conners. What I’d give for a long soak in a hot bath! I only have a shower here and sometimes my back screams out for a nice hot bath! ☹️

  44. Is there any evidence that closing bars at 10pm will stem the spread of coronavirus? 1 October 2020.

    Without clear statistics to support the policy, it appears to have been plucked out of thin air, like so many others.

    We all know that at ten sharp the virus transforms itself, vampire like, into a lethal toxin that will kill at least one person in the UK over the next fortnight!

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/30/coronavirus-covid-19-evidence-closing-bars-10pm-save-lives

    1. On the basis that there are probably 50,000+ pubs, bars and restaurants in the UK, plus heaven knows how many coffee shops, the chances of being one of the people who catches the virus there would appear to be fairly remote.

      To be one of those who catches it and then dies would be unlucky in the extreme.

    2. When entering our local yesterday for lunch it said masks must be worn, we exempted ourselves. This virus is incredibly intelligent because as soon as you sit down it deactivates itself.

    3. The annoyance here is that, as usual the Guardian is blaming the government rather than presenting facts to promote a more libertarian response.

    4. The annoyance here is that, as usual the Guardian is blaming the government rather than presenting facts to promote a more libertarian response.

      1. “Reasonable force”, but not make arrests. But I may be wrong as I have pretty well lost the plot.

    3. They are like those forest animals of colour – one gets interested in something and all the rest of the troupe come and look, too.

  46. Harry and Meghan demand end to ‘structural racism’ in Britain: Prince reveals his ‘awakening’ at issues faced by people ‘of a different coloured skin’. 1 October 2020.

    In a wide-ranging interview from their £11million California mansion, Prince Harry revealed his ‘awakening’ to issues faced by black people after meeting his wife.

    He said: ‘Because I wasn’t aware of so many of the issues and so many of the problems within the UK and also globally as well. I thought I did but I didn’t.’

    He added: ‘You know, when you go in to a shop with your children and you only see white dolls, do you even think: ‘That’s weird, there is not a black doll there?’

    This is one of those things that comes back to haunt you in twenty years where you cringe deep into your chair and say, “My God. I didn’t really say that did I?”

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8793931/Prince-Harry-reveals-awakening-issues-faced-black-people.html

        1. I strongly object to that image. It should be removed forthwith! Failure to do so will have me complaining in the most stringent terms to the Race Relations Council and the Advertising Standards Agency!

          That label should read: “Currant-of-colour”.

          2. I adore home-made redcurrant jelly. In fact I’ve still got some in the pantry. Now, where did I put that shoulder of lamb? 😋

          3. Hmm, there’s a thought for this weekend: slow-roasted shoulder of lamb (there’s one in t’ freezer.)

          5. I prefer most of the cheaper joints, George. Often need slow/longer cooking and a little more care, but always better flavour as you say.

      3. I remember seeing a vox pop of a black man being interviewed about gollies. They were clearly hoping for him to say they were racist. He actually said that he had been buying them for his little girl and that she loved them.

        Banning them would make it difficult to get her new ones.

      1. “Hairy – do you wanna play with Mommy tonight? Yes? Well read the words on the card to the nice cameraman and we’ll see…”

    4. Since we get diversity rammed down our throats a lot these days, how about blecks having some diversity rammed down theirs, so – white dolls.

    5. The man is a fool. Even Argos sell black dollies for children. Amazon has loads. In an area like Brixton which is predominately black i expect you could easily source them locally.

      If an area like mine is more than 95% white you might not see many, but people shop online for stuff like that. It’s called supply and demand. But i doubt he would be able to understand concepts.

      The reason why Harry is so easy to see racism everywhere under Meghan’s misinformation drive is because of his pampered existence.

      There is a program on TV about rich people swapping with poor people and living on each others budget. Harry should try that and then he would see that poverty affects both black and white.

      I just wish they would both shut up and piss off. Hypocrites both.

      1. I remember seeing black dolls in toy shop windows back in the early 1950s. I have to say they were never on my wish list.

        1. My late sister Eunice had a black plastic doll. It even had those little tight curls. The head, arms and legs were attached to the torso with hooks and rubber bands.

          We also had a golly but my youngest brother put it under the rear wheels of the coal merchant’s lorry. It was stuffed with straw.

    6. I don’t think much of their choice of background art works – those bundles of barbed wire or hairbrush clippings, or whatever they are, are completely detracting from whatever it was they were trying to say.

    7. Well it’s their own bloody fault for banishing golliwogs – the original black dolls.

    8. Many black selbs like our luvverly Lewis, have only white dolls for wives and GFs. Even, that icon, Trevor MacD from the newsroom.

    9. If Harry can read, he would do well to peruse this article. The Christmas Panto season will be opening soon – “She’s behind you…behind you”.

      Beware Critical Race Theory – the divisive ideology infiltrating school history lessons

      Let Black History Month, which starts today, be a chance for teachers to reclaim the curriculum from woke activists

      CALVIN ROBINSON
      1 October 2020 • 7:00am

      Indoctrination is defined as “the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of beliefs uncritically”. When it comes to the pernicious doctrine of Critical Race Theory (CRT), I think this is exactly what has been going on in our schools, and it is something I have been campaigning against ever since I became a teacher. Teachers are the most dedicated professionals I’ve ever had the privilege of working with; they are caring and well-meaning and I don’t believe they would purposefully intend to do this to our children. But there’s no denying that this is what has been happening.

      Black History Month begins 
today, and many teachers will be downloading lesson content from Tes (formerly Times Educational Supplement), the most popular teaching resource website in the UK.

      In a survey conducted by the campaign group Don’t Divide Us, of which I am a member, more than 90 per cent of the resources featured on the front page of the Black History Month section contained politically charged statements, uncontested political ideas and overtly political terms, such as “white privilege” and “white fragility”. Meanwhile, schools have been lecturing pupils, and sometimes parents, on the need to address their unconscious bias or implicit racism.

      These terms, taken directly from CRT, are being taught as unchallenged facts. But they are not facts, they are ideas – and highly dubious ones at that. I was pleased to see the Department for Education last week remind teachers that presenting such ideas as truths is against the law and a breach of the Education Act 1996, which states that teachers should maintain political neutrality.

      As DfE’s statement highlighted, local authorities, governing bodies and head teachers have a duty to stick to rules that forbid the pursuit of partisan political activities by junior pupils, ban the promotion of partisan political views in teaching, and mandate teachers to ensure that where political issues are brought to the attention of pupils, they are offered a balance of opposing views. It also included a much-needed reminder that “political issues does not refer solely to the discussion of party politics” and warned teachers that outside agencies, which are often brought in as “experts” to help with difficult topics, must also follow the rules. There can be no denying that the Government is taking this problem seriously.

      I believe that most teachers will appreciate the guidance. It is easy – too easy – to fall into the trap of not realising that the narratives espoused by the woke lobby, justified with the use of impenetrable academic jargon designed to baffle and confuse, are far from the whole truth.

      None of this is to say that we should not address race and racism in the classroom, but we do need to be more balanced in the way we do so. This is why Don’t Divide Us has compiled a new set of resources for teaching Black History Month, designed to be entirely free of CRT, indoctrination and divisive ideologies. Instead, they take account of developments in historiography and substantive knowledge.

      For instance, one resource I designed focuses on the contributions made by the British Commonwealth of Nations during the Second World War, which accounted for roughly 3.5 million of the 8.5 million troops engaged in battle across the globe. Rather than encouraging division by emphasising race, this honest look at the wartime story of the Commonwealth promotes diversity in context through a comprehensive look at the contributions of Sikh infantrymen, East African troops in Burma, Jamaican pilots in the RAF, and other Commonwealth soldiers, including our Australian cousins.

      There is no need to “decolonise” the curriculum, but perhaps it is time to reclaim it from woke activists and questionable influences. British history isn’t black or white, it is complex and challenging – but, ultimately, a part of our shared heritage.

      Black History Month, as with any history lesson, should reflect the broad depth of British history. While there are elements of our past we should learn from, there is plenty more that we can all be proud of.

      Calvin Robinson is a school governor and former assistant principal

      https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/10/01/beware-critical-race-theory-divisive-ideology-infiltrating/

      No Comments permitted

  48. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0e70020f57f08a42d3a0000a6bd70b0ab2338bef07ce041949b1fe2e6bc3c0c5.png To all those obsessive Yankophiles who are hell-bent on replacing standard English with vacuous Americanisms, I shall not be joining you in your quest for a universal form of grunting.

    ‘Smart’ will always mean tidy and well turned out, and nothing else. ‘Dumb’ will invariably mean mute; that’s all. The English language is the richest source of vocabulary and synonyms on the planet. There is no necessity, whatsoever, to adopt gormless slang from across the Atlantic as a new “standard”.

    2. Languages evolve. The reason English – in all its variations – has become the dominant world language is because of its flexibility.
      When I did Old English i.e, Anglo-Saxon, I noticed that the invading tribes dropped the noun gender nonsense very quickly. That development simplified the language straightaway (think of blasted adjectives having to agree).

      1. Making the adjective agree with it’s noun enhances the precision and clarity of the sentence, as you know unambiguously to what noun the adjective applied. It’s not just invented to give teachers something to plague their class with…

        1. It’s less necessary with a SVO (Subject Verb Object) language. Proximity to the noun is usually enough. We do have gendered adjectives anyway, without having to make them agree in number and case – a handsome man, but a beautiful woman, for example.

      2. As I’ve pointed out countless times, Nursey, English used to evolve. That is why it gave us the rich vocabulary that progressed from the time of Chaucer, via Shakespeare, to Dickens, Austen and Kipling.

        Since then, though, it has gone into retrograde progression, devolving at an alarming rate back towards grunting. Young people, these days, possess only a small fraction of the vocabulary that those living over 100 years ago routinely enjoyed using.

        1. ‘Morning, George, “Young people, these days, possess only a small fraction of the vocabulary that those living over 100 years ago routinely enjoyed using.” And that consists of non-words or made up jargon.

        2. When I was trawling through local records for my dissertation, I was struck at the variations in literacy levels.
          The worst, strangely enough, were during the late C18; maybe it was a local recruiting problem, maybe it was a wider concern.
          I dislike the ‘like, like’ and Oz interrogative as much s anyone, but it really isn’t universal.

          2. “The worst, strangely enough, were during the late C18…”

            Literacy levels in England at that time were about 65% for men and 40% for women.

          3. No, it really isn’t. There are a lot of intelligent and articulate young people about in the country/world and a lot of them are every bit as hard-working as their predecessors too.

            The latest video from my younger niece shows me that my youngest great-nephew (29 months) already has an impressive vocabulary – he learns words faster than my hoover sucks up debris. Of course it helps that his mother talks to him, a lot.

          4. I’m amazed at how much todays young folk know, in comparison to 40 years ago when I was their age. It’s scary, really. And great!

  49. Good morning all.

    SIR – Boris Johnson’s sartorial inelegance perfectly matches the omnishambles over which he presides. He needs to go – the Sunak the
    better.
    Godfrey Green
    Cardigan.

    I am surwe that Godfrey could recommend a suitable woolly.

  50. A muddled thought from me okay…

    The BBC is going gungho about Black history month, and it is becoming rather tedious .

    Here in this part of Dorset are loads of reminders about prisoners who were marched to Southampton to be confined to convict ships and then transported to Botany Bay

    10 common crimes committed by convicts
    Petty theft. By far the most common crime that led to transportation was petty theft or larceny. …
    Burglary or housebreaking. …
    Highway robbery. …
    Stealing clothing. …
    Stealing animals. …
    Military offences. …
    Prostitution. …
    Crimes of deception.

    During the Commonwealth, Cromwell overcame the popular prejudice against subjecting Christians to slavery or selling them into foreign parts, and initiated group transportation of military[14] and civilian prisoners.[15] With the Restoration, the penal transportation system and the number of people subjected to it, started to change inexorably between 1660 and 1720, with transportation replacing the simple discharge of clergyable felons after branding the thumb. Alternatively, under the second act dealing with Moss-trooper brigands on the Scottish border, offenders had their benefit of clergy taken away, or otherwise at the judge’s discretion, were to be transported to America, “there to remaine and not to returne”.[16][17] There were various influential agents of change: judges’ discretionary powers influenced the law significantly, but the king’s and Privy Council’s opinions were decisive in granting a royal pardon from execution.[18]

    The system changed one step at a time: in February 1663, after that first experiment, a bill was proposed to the House of Commons to allow the transporting of felons, and was followed by another bill presented to the Lords to allow the transportation of criminals convicted of felony within clergy or petty larceny. These bills failed, but it was clear that change was needed.[19] Transportation was not a sentence in itself, but could be arranged by indirect means. The reading test, crucial for the benefit of clergy, was a fundamental feature of the penal system, but to prevent its abuse, this pardoning process was used more strictly. Prisoners were carefully selected for transportation based on information about their character and previous criminal record. It was arranged that they fail the reading test, but they were then reprieved and held in jail, without bail, to allow time for a royal pardon (subject to transportation) to be organised.[20

    (Most of them were sent to America) before Australia became the preferred destination)

    The point I am clumsily making is , here in Britain in those days , life was difficult and vicious for many who were trying to eke out a living , and one has to pay a visit to the Tolpuddle Martyrs museum to see the hardship WHITE Britons endured .

    I doubt very much whether any of those whining Windrush blacks have a clue about historical inequalities and hardship in Britain, and here in my area there are people who are related to the poor bods who were deported for minor crimes , on the long arduous journey to Australia , and the long walk they had to endure to reach Southampton ..

    3. Quite so. North America and the Caribbean did very well with plenty of white slaves sent there from the UK, until the American Revolution. Thereafter our convicts were sent to Australia. The Americas had to make do with slaves from Africa as a very substandard replacement.

      1. Morning DM

        Horrible me says the Blacks are bigging themselves up , because they all have a chip on their shoulder, and are really bottom of the list compared with educated Indians who are blessed with high IQs

  53. Here’s one for you:
    When trimming ear hair, try not to snip your earlobe. It bleeds forever, and runs down your neck to your collar… :-((

    3. Is the white chap on the right of the group sat on something or already taking the knee?

        1. Can’t see his right leg – that is what made me wonder. Tried with a magnifying glass but still can’t see it.

  55. 324185+ up ticks,
    Will we be upset when we get set for the re-set, a multitude will be happy
    on account they have been supporting / voting for a political system that has had the re-set agenda as a major aim & on it’s books for years

    Migration Watch UK has condemned Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s plan to open up the jobs of millions of British workers to global competition as a part of its post-Brexit economic strategy, despite looming high unemployment in the wake of the China virus.

    Old “amnesties R me” johnson puts there are “more ways to skin a cat” into practise.

    1. REPOST:

      The larger the labour pool the cheaper the labour.
      Post-war UK unemployment reached a high of 11.9% in 1984.
      Things need to get much worse before we return to those levels.

      1. 324185+, up ticks,
        Js,
        Did someone not write a book about it ?
        Totally different ball game now, the lab con 1984 were at the plotting stage before hitting the treachery trail with the assassination of Mrs Thatcher.
        Then into their stride as a coalition with latch lifter blair flooding the Country.

        “Things need to get much worse before we return to those levels”
        I just cannot visualise how things can get much worse this side of a civil war.

        1. “I just cannot visualise how things can get much worse…”

          You talking about UKIP again ogga 🙂

          1. 324185+ up ticks,
            Js,
            The real UKIP gave us success on two occasions that were a benefit to the Country, the party you admitted to voting for gave us what exactly in the last two decades?

          3. 324185+ up ticks,
            Js,
            Was, “is ” no longer applies.
            What is an undeniable fact is there is only one lab/lib/con coalition party, and boy don’t we know it.

    2. You need to go back to the Kennedys in the States and Thatcher over here as your starting point for the corruption of our political elite. The dystopian future we are about to experience has been planned for over at least the past thirty to forty years.

      Our globalist masters have been run by organised crime gangs for decades as have our supposed security services. Boris is a mere glove puppet taking instructions from his globalist masters.

      There have been several major pointers such as the Iraq war, the Twin Towers and the unexplained detonation of the security building on 9/11 and the stupid escapades in Libya and Afghanistan.

      Our only hope is that sufficient of us say ‘enough is enough’ and expose politicians like Blair and Cameron for the criminals they are.

      1. 324185+ up tick,
        Afternoon C,
        That has been my main theme for many a year if you check my back post’s.

        I pegged the road to treachery starting in mid 70s but the political assassination of Mrs Thatcher really brought the political rodents into their own ,building up to now as we witness total disregard of the indigenous peoples.

        Plus a new kind of establishment justice, that being truncheon justice is being meted out.

        Currently I do put in on par with the skipper going down to the bilge section of the good ship Blighty with an oxy / acet kit and burning a bleeding great hole out of the arse end.

        1. I should have added that Covid-19 may have been released from a Wuhan laboratory but not necessarily by the Chinese. We are dealing with bio-terrorism.

          This whole Covid exercise has been planned for years and Gates himself and other players had rehearsed the implementation of fear mechanisms for control of the plebs and vaccinations for all just last year.

          They and their international gangster accomplices stand to make trillions out of the sale of dubious vaccines.

          Edit: Serco, G4S and Capita are already coining it big time at the fringes whilst Astra Zeneca and Glaxo Smith Kline are laughing all the way to the bank.

  57. The Mayor of Middlesbrough, Andy Preston, says he is prepared to defy new tighter lockdown restrictions announced by the Government.

    Health Secretary Matt Hancock this morning announced a ban on all social mixing between people in different households in the Liverpool city region, Warrington, Hartlepool and Middlesbrough. He also recommended that people only visit care homes in exceptional circumstances, and guided against all but essential travel.

    In a video statement following the announcement, Mr Preston said: “I have to tell you I think this measure has been introduced based on factual inaccuracies and a monstrous and frightening lack of communication, and ignorance.

    “I do not accept the statement at all. I do not accept these measures.

    “We need to talk to Government, they need to understand our local knowledge, expertise and ability to get things done, and preserve jobs and well-being.
    He continued: “As things stand, we defy the Government and we do not accept these measures.
    “We need to get Covid under control and we need to work with people to find a way of preserving jobs and mental health.”

    It comes as city leaders in Liverpool have questioned whether the new measures go far enough, with Liverpool’s mayor Steve Rotheram and the leaders of the city region’s six authorities releasing a joint statement requesting access to further scientific evidence, as well as greater financial support to keep businesses afloat.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/coronavirus-news-uk-covid-cases-today-lockdown-update/

    Well said Andy a bit of common sense at last.

    1. Mr Preston is an interesting character. Once a Labour member but with a record of doing and saying not-very-Labour things, he won the election as an independent with more than twice the number of votes of the Labour candidate.

    2. I am reminded of the late Dr Kelly who was bumped off for telling the truth. A D-Notice of 75 years was placed on the inquiry papers courtesy of Blair.

  58. Alexei Navalny says he believes Vladimir Putin was behind poisoning. 1 October 2020.

    The Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who is recovering in Germany after being poisoned with a nerve agent in Russia, has accused Vladimir Putin of being behind the attack, in an interview with a German newspaper.

    Navalny’s supporters have frequently maintained that such an attack could only have been ordered at the top levels, though the Kremlin has steadfastly denied any involvement in it.

    Navalny, a politician and corruption investigator who is Putin’s fiercest critic, was flown to Germany two days after falling ill on 20 August on a domestic flight in Russia.

    This man is a political nonentity. It is like hearing that Boris Johnson has attempted to assassinate Ed Davey!.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/01/alexei-navalny-says-he-believes-vladimir-putin-was-behind-poisoning

    1. 324185+ up ticks,
      Morning AS,
      Now there’s a thought, I personally do not believe he would do that unless, to curry favour on there being a General Election close at hand.

    3. How on earth do people as stupid and unpleasant as Ed Davey make any headway in politics? Remember he was the replacement for ‘Speedy’ Chris Huhne in Cameron’s government and he was even worse.

      I am not up-to-date with the scandal – is Speedy still with the Lesbian transsexual?

      2. God Knows.
        His then partner in crime is stepping out with some failed Labour politico.
        (I’m too lazy to look up the names.)

      3. I associate Liberals with strange goings on, cycle lanes , peculiar art , dubious sexual histories, and they are a pro European party.

        “Since Liberal Democrats believe in the worth of every individual, we are internationalists from principle, rather than nationalists who define their nation or race in opposition to others and thrive on division and intolerance. We believe that the free movement of people and the free exchange of ideas, goods and services across national boundaries enrich people’s lives, broaden their horizons and help to bring communities together in shared understanding. ”

        I cannot agree with that.

        1. 324185+ up ticks,
          Morning TB,
          We must give credit where due, they are the most honest out of the pro eu lab/lib/con coalition in regards to dealing with the eu.
          They have never made a pretence of their
          pro brussels stance.

        2. “…nationalists who define their nation or race in opposition to others and thrive on division and intolerance.”

          A gross misrepresentation of the idea of national identity.

      4. 324185+ up ticks,
        R,
        I believe she is now finding favour with an “it” it’s
        sexual category is unclear to me at this moment in time.

  60. “And although it is more than 4,000 miles from Britain, Priti Patel commissioned Whitehall officials to explore the possibility of building an asylum processing centre on the UK overseas territory of Ascension Island.”

    I have a better suggestion. Take them back to Calais and dump them on the quays and beaches. The Frogs aren’t doing anything to stop them leaving, why would they do anything to stop them returning?

    1. 324185+ up ticks,
      Afternoon P,
      Precisely my sentiments, why incur more transportation
      cost’s, money that could be used on something completely useless such as HS2.

  61. One of the elephants has left the room.

    After 47 years of sponging off the tax and TV licence payer, Dam Jenni Murray has finally shut up. Leaving Radio 4 Wimmins Hour with a golden farewell and a massive pension she will be a hard act to follow. Not many people could talk for so long about nothing of interest and cause so much verbal effluence without years of previous indoctrination – but the BBC will find someone, you can be sure of that.

    1. I had forgotten just what a load of tosh that Reddy song was. The other fatty Jane Garvey is off too thank goodness.

      The end of an ‘era’ thank God.

      1. Nellie the Elephant packed her trunk
        And said goodbye to the circus
        Off she went with a trumpety-trump
        Trump, trump, trump

  64. Meanwhile, Ginge and whinge are mouthing off about that which doesn’t concern them now:

    PRINCE HARRY DEMANDS END TO ‘STRUCTURAL RACISM’ IN BRITAIN

    The Duke and Duchess of Sussex today demanded an end to ‘structural racism’ in Britain.
    In an interview from their £11 million Californian mansion, Prince Harry revealed his is ‘awakening’ to racial issues faced by black people after meeting his wife.
    The prince said that although London was celebrated as one of the world’s most diverse cities, ‘If you actually get out on the streets and talk to people, it doesn’t feel as diverse as it actually is.’
    Harry also weighed in on Diversity’s controversial BLM dance routine on Britain’s Got Talent and said he was ‘surprised’ by the negative comments and complaints it had received.
    Meanwhile, Meghan Markle praised Black Lives Matter praised in America, calling them ‘beautiful’.

    More nonsense from the self-imposed exiles who no longer live here and wish to have nothing more to do with us and we wish to have nothing more to do with them. We are not interested in their witterings and certainly wonder why he thinks he can ‘demand’. Just two words – Shut Up.

    https://unredacted.co.uk/2020/10/01/prince-harry-demands-end-to-structural-racism-in-britain/

    1. Wonder if she’d call the BLM rioters ‘beautiful’ if she didn’t have the security she has and they were coming for her?

      1. Maybe she should stop straightening her hair and sunbathe a little in case they come knocking on doors. You can never be too careful.

    2. Interesting that Sparkles and her pussy whipped toy boy describe BLM protests in the US as ‘a beautiful thing’. I suppose its OK so long as they only burn down other people’s property and don’t trash the mansion of one of the world’s most privileged couples. Much of the rioting and destruction is in black neighbourhoods and the damage done has wrecked the prospects of the locals. But as BLM aims to destroy capitalism, its no surprise, but lets not hear any complaints later that there are no jobs. Not even the North American Indians are safe. Sad. https://www.startribune.com/riots-arson-leave-minnesota-communities-of-color-devastated/570921492/

    3. The sooner the Queen strips that twat and his second-hand wife of all their titles – and their son from the succession line – the better.

      Let’s see how they enjoy life as just your average American millionaires.
      :¬))

      1. They have to be stripped of their titles and Harry and his son – if it is his son – removed from the line of succession. BTW has there ever been a DNA test on Harry? Will he be joining Justin Welby whose real father was just in when his supposed father had just popped out!

        1. If there has, there would be a D notice on it and it would be locked away for a century.

    5. What a pillock. Better to keep silent, Harry, and be thought an idiot than open your mouth and prove it.

        1. I should think he is a wanker both literally and metaphorically as I very much suspect that Migraine has turned off the supply of puff and grunt.

    6. I wonder if Harry has any idea of the irony behind his criticism of ‘white privilege’.

      1. He doesn’t understand irony, or hypocrisy, or anything that requires some self awareness or critical thought. He knows that he had better do what his dominating wife tells him to do, or he’ll be in trouble, but, other than that, not much.
        What a sad end to a guy who could have had the world at his fingertips.

        1. Many men are made by their women others are destroyed by them.

          So many of my old friends say that marrying my wife was the best thing I ever did and I am sure many other Nottlers are the same. There is a terrible sadness in what has been done to Harry – he is going to end up a very sad and lonely old man.

          1. Just remember Richard that behind every successful man there stands an astonished Mother-in-Law

      2. I wonder if Harry has any idea of the irony behind his criticism of ‘white privilege’.

  65. And the latest update on the Penally illegals camp:

    ‘Today a report from the BBC outlined criticisms by asylum seekers at the camp.
    The
    asylum seekers said that the site was cold and “impossible to social
    distance”, with some saying the barracks brought back memories of wars
    they fled from.’

    And just a few hours later:

    ‘A man has been arrested on suspicion of arson and criminal damage at the Penally training camp’.
    If I set fire to my sheltered studio will I be housed in a 4* hotel??
    No,thought not
    We are being played for fools

    1. If, as they claim, they are ‘fleeing from wars’, I would have thought a roof over one’s head in a safe place, food provided etc. would be luxury.

      1. I wasn’t aware that France was a war-torn country – some parts of it are less than salubrious (due to incomers), but under fire?

    7. Austere it may be but anybody who compares the former Army Training Camp at Penally to a war-zone has obviously never been in a war-zone.

    9. They should be immediately deported and dumped on Rockall and left to shift for themselves.

  67. More laughter at the blatant propaganda of Bill Gates and his World Health Organization (newly stuffed with $400,000,000 from Gates’ best friend Boros of the UK) and at the ”Daily Telegraph” for their latest Gates bought and paid for ”Global Health” article pushing the Gates vaccine….

    The globalist mantra………………….

    ”None of us will be safe until everyone is safe – this is a historic test for global cooperation”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/global-pandemic-requires-world-effort-end-none-us-will-safe/

    Look who is onboard with Gates now. None other than one of Soros’ best friends…… Ursula Von Der Leyen.

    Looks like the World Government Team is massing for a takeover !

  68. Back from Horsepiddle. Apparently my lungs are perfectly healthy. Phew – I’ll have a blow out to celebrate. (“Blow out” geddit)

    While waiting interminably for the technician to do the test, I had the misfortune to sit opposite a great big telly on the wall – beaming out beeboid propaganda for “History Month of Colour”. As if I cared- but there was nowhere else to sit.

    It made me very glad that I never watch telly news, politics or current affairs.

  69. Afternoon, everyone. Life continues to be bumpy rather than smooth and trouble-free. I’ve just renewed my campervan insurance. The new company sent me the documents and asked me to check them, which I did and found a couple of errors. I emailed them the corrections, now they want me to ring them (and hang on the phone for ages judging by past experience) to “discuss” the amendments. Not content with that, they won’t accept my renewal notice as proof of no claims, so I’ve got to get in touch with my previous company to get written proof. This is the only insurance company I’ve ever dealt with which required a DVLA share number so they could check my licence. If they are like this now, what will they be like in the unfortunate event I need to make a claim? As I am unlikely to be going anywhere in the camper, that is not likely to arise, but I’ve emailed them back to tell them I shan’t be dealing with them next year and told them to ring me if they want to discuss the correction of their mistakes. Why can’t people do their job properly in the first place?

    1. Good evening, Conwy. Don’t you have a cooling off period in which you can cancel the new policy -and look elsewhere?

      1. It was such a hassle getting quotes and sorting it out in the first place and the old policy expires in a few days, so I shan’t bother. My old company knows I”m not going to renew with them, but I may end up going back next year as they will no doubt be competitive again, due to its being “new business”.

        1. I really loathe the way loyal customers are treated like shit while newbies get all the good deals. Seems universal now in the financial sector generally.

          1. The stupid thing is that they are hoping to attract what they hope will become loyal customers.

          2. Discurse playing up again – first it wouldn’t post at all – then it posted the same comment three times!

          3. Indeed. It’s one reason why I change my providers regularly. It’s the only way to get a competitive quote.

      2. I should add that the broker would charge £50 if I cancelled, even within the cooling off period and the insurance company might add to that! I didn’t anticipate these problems when I signed up to it.

      1. I thought for a moment that Starmer’s Cat, called Smith, is a Corbynite. It would not surprise me if they indoctrinated their pets 🙂

          1. There was nothing wrong with your sentence – I just read it quickly and superficially.

      2. Well, black people can return to their black country and build their own world, to their liking, if they wish. We are not stopping them. We’ll even help them on their way.

      3. I’ve no problem with a white world for white people. You get on and create a black world for black people and, provided that they never collide, we may all live in harmony (Piano Keys)

    3. STOP LOOKING AT US. STOP REPORTING US. STOP FILMING US. WE WANT TOTAL PRIVACY.

      That’s why we left the United Kingdom

    4. These sick scribbles are symptomatic of the rebellious mindset of those on the left. But I have seen very similar scribbles before, although the ones I saw were considerably larger and, very appropriately, both brown and grey.

      I once attended a reception at the beautiful British Embassy in Cairo with its sweeping staircases, wonderful portraits and views over the Nile. The reception was held in a large room on the second floor, which I had been in previously. The Ambassador asked me what I thought of the new decor. Before I had time to think of something polite to say, he said “Obviously you don’t like it”!

      All the beautiful old pictures and portraits had been removed. There were two similar brown and grey squiggles (rather like those in your photo) on the walls at each end and there was a large framed item in the middle, of green stripes on a yellow background. There was nothing else. I asked several people what they thought and the polite consensus was, especially from Egyptians, that “It’s not what we expect to see in a British Embassy”.

      I hardly need to say that Tony Blair had visited the Embassy a month previously and told the Ambassador to take down the old rubbish and replace it with something modern to reflect the New Britain.

      1. Blair: “we are a young country….” I will never forget those words. Unbelievable from a Prime Minister of these proud and ancient islands.

        2. I suppose Blair was ignorant of our many Neolithic sites and our more obvious Megalithic monuments such as Stonehenge and Avebury.

          Blair was and remains a money grubbing Philistine of the first rank. When the bastard finally drops dead people will ‘make love in the streets’ to quote Ken Livingston on Thatcher’s demise.

          1. My abiding wish is to live long enough to dance on his grave and to know that I have survived him. He has looked awful recently, as though he is being eaten away from inside – the devil already taking up roost for his dues.

    1. Serco shareholders aren’t complaining TB.
      No surprise that the hotel owner in Patel’s constituency had an unpronounceable surname.

    2. ‘Tis only a boat and a half, Mags – see my earlier posts apropos cruise liners to Somalia via Marseille.

    1. He’s quite good – so is his sister. But not quite as good as the beeboids would have you believe. I expect them to improve with age.

      Have you noticed, they never mention their skin colour?

          2. So do I and Julian Lloyd Webber is up there with the best. I was thinking more about a body of outstanding performances over a lifetime.

            Edit: I have watched master classes given by all four and these demonstrate their genius. Casals played Bach all lightness and air and was a particular revelation.

          3. Did you watch the concert he and his sister gave at the Proms? No audience except the announcers and technicians. We thought they were superb. We also watched the 2016 docu about the family the other night, which we’d recorded earlier.

            They are a highly talented family, and interesting for this reason, rather than skin colour. Their mother has nurtured those talents in all her children.
            I think had they been a white family with so many talented musicians, they would have still attracted a lot of interest.

          5. There’s a more recent one of them during lockdown – the one we watched the other night was from 2016 when he won the Young Musicians. One for keeping and watching again.

          6. I missed the Proms altogether for fear of more political posturing and the inexcusable absence of an audience. I agree that it matters not whether they are white or black. They are very fine musicians.

            Skin colour evidently mattered a great deal to Meghan Markle at her wedding where Sheku performed. I doubt she would have called upon the services of a white performer.

          1. I remember the brilliant Korean cellist Meung-wha Chung at a performance in Sheffield City Hall in around 1970.

            On reflection it might be a mistake to narrow the field too much.

      2. Why should skin colour ever be mentioned?

        If it was never mentioned the “problems” might go away.

    2. His mum was interviewed on Radio 3 a couple of days ago. very impressive lady. Up at 4:00 am to get five youngsters ready to go to the RCM some distance away…

    2. They were doing the same back in 2015 when the first wave were forcing their way into Europe.
      Taking a sharp left at the newly-erected Hungarian border fence, tear gas and water cannon.

    3. Don’t forget the sublet flats at Grenfell. It ain’t news so it’s not reported. Pah !

  76. Halfcock’s French counterpart,Olivier Véran, at a press conference which has just ended – where he indicated worries about the rapid spread of Covid – added:

    “”Living with the virus does not mean living by renouncing our values and our freedoms””

    He may be talking balls about the figures for “cases” and “tests” – but at least he understands the need for HOPE.

    1. Despair – I can cope with despair. It is the hope that I cannot cope with

      [John Cleese in Clockwise]

      1. Thank you. I’ve been struggling to remember the source of that. It has been going around in my head for weeks. (Voltaire, Kierkgaarde, Sartre, Proudhon…)

  77. I am off for a well earned drink. Second half of Dr Zhivago this evening. Haven’t seen it since 1972!

    A demain.

        2. We have a brilliant unabridged audio version of the book. Superbly read. (Also A Karenina – same reader)

        1. I saw the original (Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Rod Steiger et al.) and it was good, but I have to say I preferred the 2002 remake with Hans Matheson as Dr. Zhivago, Keira Knightley as Lara, Sam Neill as Viktor Komarovsky and Kris Marshall as Pasha Antipov.

          1. I had no idea that there was another version, Duncan – until now !

            I am intrigued …

          2. It’s really very good, and much closer to Pasternak’s book than David Lean’s film version.

            I have it on DVD and I commend it to you.

          3. On your recommendation, Duncan; I have ordered Dr Z-II from Amazon, I should get it by the weekend !

        1. What? He’s actually travelling in the locomotive and not in the train that it’s pulling?

          2. Neither, actually. From memory he is standing on the train’s “balcony” so not IN the train.

          3. “Hello, I’m on the train.”

            “No you’re not! You’re in it! Nobody travels on a train!”

          6. Good afternoon, Else.

            In India there are thrice as many on the train as in it! Two unfulfilled ambitions for me:

            1. Running along the top of a train’s carriages whilst it is in motion (as in countless cowboy and spy films) and remembering to duck for bridges.

            2. Having a go on one of those railway handcarts (the ones where you push a see-saw-type lever up and down to make it go).

          7. Whilst you are waiting, you might like to watch Peter O’Toole in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and Buster Keaton in THE RAILRODDER.

          8. The ‘train’ consists of one Red-flagged coach – for senior revolutionary, Pasha Antipov (Tom Courtney) …

          9. That’s a film I need to see again. Along with countless others. I’ll have to see if I can get some of them on DVD.

    1. A variation on the old joke about the rookie student nurse giving her first suppository.

      1. ” Oops! We’re having trouble posting your comment. Check your internet connection and try again.”
        Internet connection is fine.
        West Coast America seems to be running the internet.

          2. Yep – but it’s quite an old laptop with an old version. I can’t really get to grips with the more modern one on the PC.

          3. I need a new laptop, not Windows 10.
            I’ve been running Linux Mint 19 from a USB stick and much prefer it.
            It seems to be much better than Windows once I download all the different packages.

          5. Each to their own Ob.
            My better half seems happy with Windows 10. She can have it.
            I can’t be doing with it. Too bloated.

          6. You realise of course that windows is a general purpose operating system installed on about 85% of the world’s personal computers. That’s massive variations in hardware and usage and it’s designed to keep as many users happy as possible.
            Windows 10 is a fine operating system. It’s shockingly stable for a M$ product.

          7. Bought a Surface Pro at Easter – now, thats a PC.
            Boots in no time, slim & light, close the keyboard and it switches off, open the keyboard & it’s on – and you can detach the keyboard. Pen & touchscreen, where you can rest your hand on the screen and the pen still works fine.
            Just what I’ve been looking for for years.

          8. I keep looking at the Surface. Sorely tempted but the prices put me off.
            For the general user such as myself they’re expensive.

          11. That poor, were you?

            We were so poor, I wanted to eat mine, but HG said that she had put too much effort into them to waste them on me.
            .
            I thought that the effort was to fatten them up.

            {:-((

          12. I love the laundry capsule adverts; they keep telling me to keep away from children.
            Now that’s one spot of advice I will quite happily follow.

          13. #MeToo, Anne, I just wonder who was the nerd who came up with that line. I too, do all I can to keep away from children – particularly those currently at University and those who cannot speak English but rely upon TXTSPK.

          14. No. It’s a tablet 🙂

            The speed is because it has a SSD. The downside is SSDs fail faster than mechanical hard drives, and more spectacularly too as hard drives tend to deteriorate noticeably whereas SSDs just keep on going as if nothing wrong until one day when you can’t read anything on them.

          15. That’s why it is advisable to back up to an external hard drive on a daily basis. If you’re not happy with Microsoft back up, try Macrium.

          17. I’m just a user – my sons do the installation bit – but I was told many years ago never to use Microsoft. This one is Debian – looks and feels much like the old Windows XP that we were still using in the office when I retired. Easy to find your way around, with a proper menu.

      1. Charles De Gaulle? No, we need a true-Brit Churchill who , when asked, stated, “The only cross I bear is the Cross of Lorraine.”

        You work it out.

  82. BBC news on the conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh.

    Any comment on, or mention of, Islam?

    What do you think?

    1. Of course not. The BBC can’t permit that to be discussed.

      Heck, they completely ignored the Rohinga Muslim violence. Far easier to spread lies about the buddhists.

  83. It seems today is International Day of Older Persons – we have our own day so the government can despise us collectively as well as individually, no doubt.

  84. I’ve been wearing the same face mask for six weeks now, I think I’ve just discovered penicillin

    1. I regularly see at least two discarded masks (on the ground, in the bushes, on walls) when I walk the dog. Surely they would be super spreaders.

        1. If it’s head height in the bushes or on a wall, surely this deadly virus can leap across if I have to pass within six feet of it 🙂

          6. I was just thinking about including dogs in the limit; this morning I met my neighbour with her three and I had mine. That made six of us. Phew the covid stasi would have been dobbing us in if we’d had another with us!

          7. Just watch out for the curtain twitchers! I was told today that in Scotland there is £100 reward for catching covicriminals!

          8. Not many windows, let alone curtains, where we were, fortunately. What has this once great country come to when people are rewarded for turning in their neighbours? USSR or what?

          9. Not many windows, let alone curtains, where we were, fortunately. What has this once great country come to when people are rewarded for turning in their neighbours? USSR or what?

          10. I despair Conway. My old man and I were talking about the 50/60s today and how much simpler and kinder the world seemed to be. We were much more free as children, and much less sophisticated, but we weren’t slaves to technology and we didn’t have every bit of info at our fingertips. The world seemed less bleak than today! I know we were probably wearing rose-tinted glasses as we chatted, but it was a bit nostalgic.

          11. We never locked our back door when I was growing up and nobody ever burgled us. Our neighbours helped out in times of trouble. My father was never out of work – he lost his job just before one Christmas, but had found another by the New Year. I used to roam in the woods with my dog and go plane spotting and nobody worried (except for the day I got a puncture a long way from home and was very late because I had to walk). Our local bobby (we had a police house in the village) knew everybody and knew who to keep an eye on. It was a very safe time to be growing up in the fifties. I think the rot started in the sixties – anti-authority, laissez-faire, student power, Red Brigade and the like.

          12. Yup. In the fifties my mother left the front door open. She polished the brass step at the front door with Brasso where the milk tokens were placed for fresh milk deliveries next day. Nobody stole the milk checks and nobody stole the milk bottles unless the Gypsy Fairground was in town.

            If we children saw a black man it was so unusual that we would exclaim ‘mummy there’s a black man’.

            Now our immediately post war lives have changed out of all recognition to our childhood existences. If only we could set the clock back to the fifties, when despite rationing and the hardships and mental scars we experienced from fighting Germans, we were relatively happy and content with our meagre lot.

            We were a nation united by the experience of war. Our politicians have since sold us down the river. May they all rot in hell.

          14. I can recall just the one, black as charcoal, on the Midland Bridge in Bath, close to Green Park Station.

            They now claim erroneously that the blacks rebuilt Britain after the war. They did not.

            They got in the way, securing employment on London Underground where their levity and inaction caused a deterioration in the service which led ultimately to Kings Cross.

            I am getting sick of the apologists for blacks. We owe them nothing and wish they would bugger off back to whence they came. They have brought nothing but drugs, knife and gun crime to our country.

          15. I can recall just the one, black as charcoal, on the Midland Bridge in Bath, close to Green Park Station.

            They now claim erroneously that the blacks rebuilt Britain after the war. They did not.

            They got in the way, securing employment on London Underground where their levity and inaction caused a deterioration in the service which led ultimately to Kings Cross.

            I am getting sick of the apologists for blacks. We owe them nothing and wish they would bugger off back to whence they came. They have brought nothing but drugs, knife and gun crime to our country.

          16. Is it it beyond the bounds of possibility that another war may be in the offing.

            Neither Germany nor Brussels wants us to leave the EU and negotiations are not going well for the EU.

            How well prepared are our armed forces? in 1938, Churchill was cast as a ‘warmonger’, I would be proud to accept and wear his mantle.

          17. If the EU want a war they can fight it with their own EU army. When they come unstuck we should leave them to their fate and not rescue the bastards as we have done in history.

            The Germans and French have always resented us for sorting out the mess of their own creation after WW II. In future we should just let the buggers get on with it.

          18. If the EU want a war they can fight it with their own EU army. When they come unstuck we should leave them to their fate and not rescue the bastards as we have done in history.

            The Germans and French have always resented us for sorting out the mess of their own creation after WW II. In future we should just let the buggers get on with it.

          19. The same for us – we knew where we fitted into the scheme of things. Family, friends, community, the police, school, Brownies Sunday school, church etc. There was structure that was quite comforting. Nowadays there seems to be no coherent anything.

          20. Structures have been dismantled and demolished in order to create the chaos their plans demand, Sue. Only close families, and that last bastion of our culture, the Royal Family, stand in the way of their plans now. When the RF goes we, and what remains of our culture, will disintegrate. The family has been under attack for years, many now lie in ruins by the wayside, and as we can observe on an almost daily basis the Royal Family is also under attack. However, the Crown has stood solid for over 1000 years, hopefully it will withstand the attacks of a Z-list actress and her backers. To date, the Crown has always won.

          21. I remain optimistic pm! We have to be positive and stroppy! I loved your comment about stuffing your mask in you pocket and keep using it! Little acts of rebellion are great – go and stir it on the Beeb news website! It’s dead easy to wind them up – I’ve been modded 5 times tonight! Go grumpies!

          22. I like that, Sue, even though on my avatar, I profess to being a grumpy old Englishmen, I’m happy to receive grumpy aid from all corners of this United Kingdom.

          24. I can only endorse your feelings, Mum. They are the same as my Mum would have uttered. Mercifully for her, she died in 1980 and, while I lost a pal, she is at least spared what is turning out to be the next holocaust.

      2. Masks are replacing crisp packets as the greatest percentage of litter round local schools.

      1. My old DIY masks were like they before I was forced to wear the bloody things on Public Transport!

        1. My DIY masks left a fine powdery grime around my mouth and nose on removal. They do the precise opposite to what is claimed.

          Having worn a mask in Cambridge yesterday I had a difficult night with blocked sinuses. Masks are positively unhealthy. They merely represent submission to the global elite and remain a sign of our collective submission to their diktats.

        2. My DIY masks left a fine powdery grime around my mouth and nose on removal. They do the precise opposite to what is claimed.

          Having worn a mask in Cambridge yesterday I had a difficult night with blocked sinuses. Masks are positively unhealthy. They merely represent submission to the global elite and remain a sign of our collective submission to their diktats.

    3. That is my act of rebellion. Stuff it in the pocket and use it again. And next time. Ditto. They can’t check on that, yet. We all know it is a load of old rubbish anyway. I am tired of seeing these things discarded by the wayside. We carry poobags for the dog with us and pick up those masks we see with a double bag. And any other litter.

      2. My act of rebellion is to use a handkerchief as a bandanna. When the madness is over I shall be able to use it as a handkerchief again. A mask will have no use.

    2. Here’s my prediction, for what it’s worth.

      The Government will eventually see that it would be a shrewd move to bow to popular pressure and get rid of the licence fee. Then it will agree to fund the BBC, by the backdoor, from general taxation. Then watch the money-flow increase exponentially.

      Cue loud cheers at Broadcasting House – trebles, pay-rises and gold-plated pensions all round.

          1. We still pay it for some reason.
            Keep meaning to cancel the direct debit but somehow we never get round to doing it 🙁
            Maybe it’s the thought of the Beeb funding being lost in general taxation.

    1. That’s because it’s completely misleading. The ONS bulletins the article refers to state “figures for Influenza and Pneumonia represent where either of these causes have been mentioned anywhere on the death certificate meaning they will not necessarily be the underlying cause of death” Data for 2015, 2016 and 2017 indicates that flu and pneumonia were the underlying cause of death in 28% of the death certificates that mention them. By contrast, to the end of June 2020, Covid-19 was the underlying cause of death in 93% of death certificates that mention it.

      1. Even at the height of the pandemic in April & May, most of the deaths were caused in people with other underlying conditions that made them vulnerable to the virus.

        2. That’s not what the data says – they may have had co-morbidities, but the underlying cause of death was Covid-19, in 93% of death certificates where Covid-19 was mentioned.

          1. Keep trying. We’ve stopped believing anything that can’t be proven and comes from the government or the BBC.

          2. What you choose to believe or not is entirely up to you. I’m just sharing some facts.

          4. Nope, the thing about facts is that they remain so whether you choose to believe in them or not.

          5. I deal with facts in my job. They are provable in reproduceable tests.
            When it’s not possible to prove facts in this way, then one must rely upon a trusted source.
            Unfortunately the UK authorities have squandered people’s trust over the last twenty years or so by repeatedly lying and being incompetent. They no longer count as a trustworthy source by any objective assessment.
            Therefore, I repeat, you are sharing what you believe to be facts. I will reserve my judgement until I see convincing evidence.

          6. Nope again. You’re confusing facts with scientific results. It’s a fact that Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603 – try reproducing that in a test.

            You’re perfectly entitled to believe any paranoid conspiracy you choose. Without producing any evidence to support it though, and in the weight of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, it’s not a very compelling argument.

          7. Straw man post, because I haven’t put forward any argument at all.
            I’ve just said that I’ve lost faith in the authorities as a trusted source of information.
            You haven’t – well done you.

            By the way, Queen Elizabeth I dying is accepted as a fact because we have trusted sources – as I said before in my post above.

      2. 1. Main points

        There were 46,687 deaths involving the coronavirus (COVID-19)
        that occurred between 1 March and 31 May 2020 registered up to 6 June
        2020 in England and Wales; of these, 43,763 had COVID-19 assigned as the
        underlying cause of death.

        Of the deaths involving COVID-19 that occurred in England and
        Wales in March to May 2020, there was at least one pre-existing
        condition in 90.9% of cases; this is a similar level to that shown in
        March and April 2020.

        Taking into account the age structure of the population, the rate
        of deaths in the period due to COVID-19 was 210.3 per 100,000 persons
        in England compared with 193.3 per 100,000 persons in Wales; in both
        England and Wales, the mortality rate in May 2020 was significantly
        lower than in April 2020.

        COVID-19 was the most frequent underlying cause of death for
        deaths occurring in May 2020, with a fifth of all deaths (21.6%) being
        due to COVID-19; this was a smaller proportion than seen in April, when
        36.1% of all deaths were due to COVID-19.

        Males had a significantly higher rate of death due to COVID-19
        than females; the age-standardised mortality rate (ASMR) for males in
        England was 250.2 deaths per 100,000 males compared with 178.5 per
        100,000 females; in Wales, this was 226.1 deaths per 100,000 males
        compared with 168.3 per 100,000 females.

        Dementia and Alzheimer disease was the most common main
        pre-existing condition found among deaths involving COVID-19 and was
        involved in 11,950 deaths (25.6% of all deaths involving COVID-19) in
        March to May 2020.

          1. If you look at the figures in the first paragraph – those were subsequently revised downwards.

      3. By contrast, to the end of June 2020, Covid-19 was the underlying cause of death in 93% of death certificates that mention it.

        93% where the underlying cause was Covid-19?
        If you believe that you’ll believe anything.

        You wouldn’t be Andy Cochrane by any chance?

        1. I’m much more inclined to believe the ONS than the Daily Mail, certainly.

          No, I’m not Andy Cochrane by any chance.

          1. I’ll take that as a yes.

            As to the ONS statistics, on this one all they have done is count the mentions, they don’t make a clinical judgement.

            As I stated, if you believe that that 93% figure is accurate you will believe anything.

            If the doctors had put “ceased breathing” on the certificates it would be accurate and the ONS would report that as such.

            100% of cases the underlying cause was that the deceased ceased to breathe.

          2. I’m afraid you don’t appear to understand what ‘underlying cause of death’ means. It refers to “the disease or injury which initiated the train of morbid events leading directly to death”.

            The point is that doctors have put ‘Covid-19’ as the underlying cause of death on 93% of the death certificates where Covd-19 is mentioned.

          3. It was “flavour of the month”, and is a totally misleading number, as I suspect you know.

            More than 93% of those who supposedly had covid-19 as the cause of death had serious underlying health problems and a majority of those were past their initial life-expectancy at birth.

            Welcome back, Max.

          4. ‘Supposedly’? No, actually recorded by the attending doctor as the underlying cause of death.

          5. Of course it was.

            It was an easy diagnosis catch-all, that was accepted.

            Covid-19, tick.

            No need for further investigation and analysis; nothing to see here, move on.

          6. I’m sorry that you don’t have more respect for the professional expertise and integrity of doctors.

          7. I had enormous respect for the professional expertise and integrity of doctors.

            What I don’t believe is that they knew (at the time) what they were signing off and how it would be used by the politicians and “experts”. There was a huge amount of pressure and it was an easy answer for the DC’s.

            My respect has diminished as the panic-demic has progressed.

            When the dust clears, I believe that we will see that politicians and bogus scientists, like your mate Fergie, got it wrong at every stage, and that the front-line doctors and also the cancer/dementia/cardiac/mental health experts should have made a lot more noise

          9. You had enormous respect for the professional expertise and integrity of doctors up to the point when they, in their thousands, started recording a cause of death that displeases you.

            Do you think the problem lies with you or with them?

          11. Under current regulations, there is no requirement for the doctor certifying the death to have even seen the patient.

          12. In which case the attending doctor deletes the words ‘last seen by me’ and should have access to relevant medical records and results of investigations. In what proportion of cases has that happened?

          13. Proportion of what? Deaths signed off without a doctor in attendance as a fraction of all deaths or the proportion of non-attended deaths subsequently investigated?

            In either case I have no idea and I doubt anyone has, given the shoddy manner in which the exercise has been conducted. The counting of Covid deaths during this madness has been a scandal of the first order and is part of the reason for the public’s growing scepticism. The reporting by much of the media has been muddled and misleading.

          14. I’m sorry if my last comment wasn’t clear. In what proportion of deaths for which the underlying cause has been noted as Covid-19, has the attending doctor not seen the patient? I’m not sure how you parsed your second interpretation from what I wrote.

            It may be a fact that you have no idea – extrapolating from that that no one else does and the ‘whole exercise’ has been shoddily handled (by the doctors, I accept it’s true of the government) is following a chain of logic that also escapes me.

            I agree to your last point – as evidenced perfectly by the Daily Mail article that prompted this discussion.

          15. Proportions? It usually pays to establish exactly what is being discussed. I did that to avoid any confusion. Not everyone is as precise in what they write as you appear to believe you are.

            If you know the answer to either question simply say so. That way, we’ll all be better informed.

          16. Either question? I only asked one – or are you being generous in providing an example of imprecision?

            I don’t know the answer to the question I asked, which is why I asked it. Since you raised the subject, I thought you might have something more meaningful to contribute. I’m sorry that you haven’t.

          17. I simply made the point that there had been a change in the method of recording of deaths, one that has raised concerns not just with the general public but in the medical profession.

            Your question was a fair one. I didn’t have the answer. I thought you might. You didn’t. Instead, you chose to engage in the same sly condescension that you did with other members. That never looks good.

          18. Since you were the one who started with the sly condescension, I’m very happy to agree.

          19. No, I didn’t. Just about every response you’ve given to anyone on here shows you’re not here for a proper discussion but for a contest. The tone of superiority is the giveaway.

          20. Yes, you did. I’ve offered facts, you’ve offered conjecture and supposition – it’s understandable that you feel inferior as a result.

          21. It’s a discussion forum. People offer opinions and interpretations of current affairs. They get things off their chests. That’s all. You can join in but you won’t last long if take yourself so seriously.

          24. Hi Andy, good to know you’re still with us – and still playing devil’s advocate.

          25. Not Andy – just trying to bring some objectivity to the discussion. That you think that equates to playing devil’s advocate, says a lot about the tenor of this discussion.

  87. It’s not only National Poetry Day today but also the start of Black History Month:

    Mary had a little lamb
    It’s fleece was black as soot
    But everywhere that Mary went
    It couldn’t give a hoot!

  88. Goodnightall

    A supper for Autumn: Pan-fried duck breast with garlic. Braised red chicory with figs, thyme & Dubonnet. Washed down with Viña Lorea Reserva, Rioja, 2015.

  92. “Hold on, this is waiting to be approved by Not the Telegraph Letters.”

    Have I pushed my luck once too often 🙂

          1. I think I’m correct, but we’ll see.

            I posted that against his first appearance tonight.

        2. Max The Dog? Seriously?

          ETA: The only time I look in on the Gaudrian is to read Jay Rayner’s latest article.

          6. I had to google Rayner’s books. I only knew him from TV and restaurant criticism.

            They look promising and I will keep an eye open.

            If you go the “Reacher” route, ignore the films and start with the earlier ones, they become a bit “samey” after a while, although I enjoyed all of the series.

          7. Rayner was in the top-end restaurant same night UKIP’s Janice Atkinson was treating her mates to an evening of fine dining courtesy of the taxpayer. Co-incidence?
            Shortly after UKIP expelled her for expenses fraud.

            Reading wise I seem to prefer 19th history over fiction. Maybe I’m getting old 🙂

          10. That’s the series.

            The books (as usual) are better than the TV, but as a TV series, of its kind, it is one of my favourites.

          13. In which case, I suspect you will enjoy Patrick O’Brian, Patrick Robinson (not historical but good yarns) and Conn Iggulden’s series on Mongol warriors, again not your period but good yarns.

          14. Cheers again. I’ll check them out. The problem as always is not enough spare time to catch up on the reading. E-books notwithstanding.
            Currently I’m flitting between our Mau Mau campaign and re-visiting the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Again

          15. Sorry to swamp your reading.

            You might enjoy Shelby Foote’s US civil war trilogy, it was the basis of the series on the American civil war. It is long but really worth the effort.

            The Ashokan Farewell has to be one of the more haunting pieces of any TV themes

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvtyO2bPEsg

          16. Custer’s 7th Cavalry made it’s name during the Civil War. It was a very different regiment which rode into the LBH valley.

            ETA: His Crow Indian scouts twice warned him that what he was doing was suicidal.

          17. Indeed.
            It’s a fascinating reading about the run up to the “battle”, it did not reflect well on the US army.

            GAC gets a lot of approbrium, but I always thought that poor scouting was the foundation for the “disaster”.

          18. “…poor scouting …”
            Sunrise the morning of the battle Custer’s Indian scouts had their first sight of the Indian village.
            They warned Custer the village was much larger than they were told to expect.
            Custer ignored their warnings, as he did when they warned him splitting the regiment was suicidal.
            Between them, Custer and Reno attacked some 2500-3000 fighting Indians with just 350 troops.

          19. It’s poor scouting when one fails to confirm initial reports that contradict ones own belief.

          20. Custer’s 7th Cavalry made it’s name during the Civil War. It was a very different regiment which rode into the LBH valley.

            ETA: His Crow Indian scouts twice warned him that what he was doing was suicidal.

          21. I learnt as more Victorian history – particularly empire – from GMF as from history lessons.

          25. Yes. For some reason I often put an ‘s’ on the end, possibly because one so often sees reference to Lee Child’s character Jack Reacher.

            As to him being British, I don’t think I stated otherwise.

    1. ops sorry, I thought that was the disqus logon robot finder asking me to click on pictures containing windows.

      i pressed the lot and now the police are after me for following TR.

      why don’t they just say “tough, you burnt it, you live in it”

  95. Have just spent a happy half-hour on the Beeb Scotland site annoying the natsies, about the so-called mp travelling back to Holyrood from Westminster by train after a positive covid test! It’s hilarious over there and I’ve had 3 posts moderated! Nothing offensive but they don’t like the medical bod up here being called a dentist ( which he is!)

      1. He really needs to brush up on his oratorical skills! He was quite loud and hysterical on Tuesday’s propaganda show!

  96. – Can somebody please help, the covid government guidance has been to wash hands for twenty seconds, keep two meters apart and wear a mask.

    The mask wearing has been the easy bit, but washing my hands while keeping them 2 metres apart has been a bit of a struggle.

  98. Margaret Ferrier, the SNP MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West, travelled to Westminster and back – by rail – after testing positive for Covid-19.

    Earlier, she criticised Dominic Cumming for driving to Newcastle …

    Dangerous effing hypocrite …

      1. No problem. She will have presumably submitted to Dido’s Track and Trace App so all of her contacts can be traced and quarantined. There goes another ten thousand folk obliged to self isolate for 14 days.

        You really could not make this shit up. Even George Orwell would have struggled with the present hypocrisies.

    2. That bitch was keen to have dear old GSK servant Cummings jailed as I recall for visiting the company offices in Barney when staying with his parents during lockdown.

      2. Yep:

        “Margaret Ferrier: Nicola Sturgeon brands Covid-positive MP’s parliament trip indefensible as she is suspended by SNP”

  99. BBC Radio 4

    POTUS and FLOTUS have tested positive for COVID.

    Doctor says they are both well and have no symptoms.

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