Friday 12 February: A hospital’s use of the term ‘chestfeeding’ reveals worrying ignorance

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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

Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/02/12/letters-hospitals-use-term-chestfeeding-reveals-worrying-ignorance/

828 thoughts on “Friday 12 February: A hospital’s use of the term ‘chestfeeding’ reveals worrying ignorance”

    1. Morning Elsie

      I expect you owned an autograph book in your childhood , just like me .. almost every child waved theirs around .

      I remember signing a pals book .. ” By hunger or thirst , in this book I’ll be first” ..then drawing a little stick person, I must have been about 7 years old .

      1. If you’ve still got your autograph book, Maggie, I’d be delighted to write “Last!” on the back page.

        :-))

  2. ‘Morning All

    A meaty read…………

    “It wouldn’t take much to push a population of such elderly and frail

    people into a life-threatening situation. Lock them up for months on

    end. Deny them human contact on pain of arrest and fines they couldn’t

    hope to pay. Withdraw medical treatment. Quarantine their carers.

    Terrorise them with propaganda about a civilisation-ending disease.

    Order them to stay at home and avoid the contact of other people like

    the plague. Tell them hospitals standing empty are on the verge of being

    overwhelmed. Turn medical centres into places to fear, the breeding

    grounds of a deadly new disease. That should be more than enough. It has

    been more than enough. Then, change the medical protocol and criteria

    for identifying and recording the cause of their deaths, and against all

    the evidence against its fitness for such use, employ a medically

    meaningless test to turn traces of a virus that presents no threat to 80

    per cent of the population into proof of infection and cause of death.

    This is how a crisis has been manufactured. This is how a virus is being

    used to justify the programmes and regulations of the UK biosecurity

    state.”

    https://architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk/2021/01/27/lies-damned-lies-and-statistics-manufacturing-the-crisis/

    Combine Walter’s link on disabled deaths…………….

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56033813
    All too,too sinister

    1. “Six in ten covid deaths were of disabled people” for those who don’t want to click on the bbc link.
      One thing that springs to mind immediately is that the definition of disabled has been hugely expanded. I’m guessing that obesity counts as a disability by restricting movement.

      I note that “disability equality charity, Scope” is quoted in the article. That used to be the Spastics Society. I believe it actually used to help people rather than operate as a political entity.

      1. During the 1950’s there was one obese family in Colchester; it was a matriarchy of ginormous women who had many children, but, by and large, no visible impregnators. Occasionally, you would see some scrawny male alongside, rather like Angler Fish pounding the pavements.

          2. Could be true and she passed it on to the children but if the husband is also obese that makes me think they are just over eaters.

  3. Good Morning Folks,

    Another chilly start, a bit breezy and gloomy, snow still covering the moss lawn

    2. 329311+ up ticks,
      Morning Rik,
      After pushing support & join UKIP approaching the referendum months before it took place, as a rearguard anti treachery party as well as triggering the referendum, I can still hear echoing post victory “we have won, no need now of UKIP, leave it to the tories”

      Right up to the final count the lab/lib/con was a pro eu coalition group, ( still are)

      To our everlasting misfortune the party before Country brigade won the day.

  5. Well I see that the Covid psychological warfare continues apace this morning, social distancing to last until the Autumn including mask wearing, it’s the good cop one day, bad cop the next.
    The Autumn will take us up to the season where the NHS starts to get under pressure again so it is obvious that is all going to continue for another year, at least.

    1. It will last long enough for them to make the restrictions on travel permanent, due to global warming.

      The current weather is rather undermining the great conference due to happen later this year in Glasgow, where Charles is going to go fully public as one of the figureheads of the great reset. Purely to save the planet from the global boiling crisis, you understand. I doubt he will give up on travelling.

    2. They have to pin us down until 2025. That is when Klaus Schwab (WEF) reckons the elites will be able to apply the NWO.

          1. Ah,once I start drinking I tend to stop commenting,controlling my temper is hard enough sober,sometimes

          2. He carried out an unwarranted attack on Conway who decided to leave but was persuaded to come back.

            It was vicious and spiteful and Conway said he had enough trouble in his life to be having to deal with that too.

          3. Off topic.
            Reading of your recent tribulations:

            HG had to have a blood test today.

            In and done, including all the usual paperwork in under ten minutes. The results should be on her spot on the website as well as her doctor’s PC around 4pm.

            I trust you are making progress too.

            One can’t fault the service here, it’s been similar most times.

          4. Yes thanks, going well.

            I have to have a pint drawn each time which doesn’t take that long. As well as the samples for the tests.

            The first week was a breeze but last time they got very busy very quickly. I don’t know why. Then the wheels fell off.

            They were suitably apologetic and they also provided me with a packed lunch.

            It was just incredibly boring sitting alone for so long. No phone signal either.

            Next time i will take my kindle.

            Hope all is well with HG.

          5. Thank you.
            It’s like getting blood from a stone, she almost always needs two attempts by the vampire.

            Glad you are at least getting some necessary treatment.

          7. Her problem is that the veins tend to collapse.

            Once in the UK, the nurse gave up after numerous attempts and had to get a doctor to put a needle into a vein on the back of her hand.
            Worst so far in France has been two attempts and even then she’s been in and out quickly and painlessly.

  8. ‘British Empire was worse than the Nazis’. 14 February 2021.

    Contributor Kehinde Andrews, a professor of black studies at Birmingham City University, said: ‘The British Empire was far worse than the Nazis. They lasted longer and killed many more people.’

    Last night he also belittled the former PM’s contribution to the country. He said: ‘Was it Churchill out there fighting the war? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. I’m pretty sure he was at home.

    ‘I’m pretty sure that if Churchill wasn’t in the war it would have ended the same way.’

    Morning everyone. This of course is hatred and spite not history. One wonders why Andrews chooses to live in a country that he obviously loathes although why we allow him to live here is equally inexplicable. There were no policies of extermination or einsatzgruppen in the service of the Empire and its leaders were always subject to the rule of law.

    The innuendo about Churchill being cowardly is a baseless slur (the intention of the whole exercise?) Churchill was both morally and physically brave. He was involved in several military skirmishes during his lifetime and is one of the very few Politicians in the UK who have actually killed while fighting. It can be said of Churchill and no other, that at the point of its greatest danger; he and he alone, saved European Civilisation, and thus by extension the life of Andrews, who would not have survived the Nazi Tyranny.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9252143/Controversial-Cambridge-debate-hears-accusation-Winston-Churchill-white-supremacist.html

    2. I don’t even want to follow this story, it will depress me too much to see these mean and stupid people crawling like lice over Churchill’s memory. They are like destructive children who have no idea what they are destroying, because they don’t have the mental equipment to comprehend it.

    3. Kehinde Andrews has form. He regularly spouts this kind of nonsense. Perhaps he is the illegitimate son of Benjamin Zephaniah.

  9. Before I turn to the news and slit my wrists, a spot of smugness to kick off the day.
    Yesterday I completed the DT cryptic crossword; that’s the THURSDAY cryptic crossword, universally acknowledged to be the stinkeroo of the week. To complete it, I had to overcome the psychological barrier of knowing it was Thursday, which normally defeats me before I’ve started.
    I will now go off and depress myself.

    3. Morning, Nursey.

      I have never, ever, even half-completed any cryptic crossword. General knowledge crosswords are, of course, a completely different thing.

      1. Maybe you should try it whilst sitting in the room under the floor of a church? Just a thought…

  11. Covid pandemic risks repeat of 1930s chaos, says forces chief. 14 February 2021.

    Sir Nick warned that the different approaches taken by rival states to tackling the pandemic could lead to increased tensions around the world, saying: “Covid has asked some very big questions about your supply chains and how you protect your people.”

    He said the steepest challenge will come when the worst effects of the pandemic start to recede, explaining: “We will be confronted with a couple of big choices. There will be a big choice between totalitarian surveillance and citizen empowerment, and there will be a big choice between global solidarity and nationalist isolation.”

    It looks to me as if we are already in the Totalitarian Surveillance camp and if Carter has his way the Global Security gang will follow shortly!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/02/11/covid-pandemic-risks-repeat-1930s-chaos-says-forces-chief/

    1. 329311+ up ticks,
      Morning AS,
      NOT to late yet to forge a spanner of denial for the lab/lib/con coalition candidates regarding personal votes on the 6th May.

      1. We will only get a meaningful result at the ballot box if we are allowed to have a “None of the Above” box. I’m thinking of founding a party called “None of the Above”.

        1. 329311+ up ticks,
          Morning BB2,
          The necessity for one is surely there BUT, a denial of the lab/lib/con candidates just needs no X.

          Any short term gain via ” my MP” peoples is promptly overshadowed in the hands of the political hydra heads.

    2. Shouldn’t the head of the armed forces be “Sir Nicholas”? This chummy, demotic shortening of names is demeaning.

  12. Covid pandemic risks repeat of 1930s chaos, says forces chief. 14 February 2021.

    Sir Nick warned that the different approaches taken by rival states to tackling the pandemic could lead to increased tensions around the world, saying: “Covid has asked some very big questions about your supply chains and how you protect your people.”

    He said the steepest challenge will come when the worst effects of the pandemic start to recede, explaining: “We will be confronted with a couple of big choices. There will be a big choice between totalitarian surveillance and citizen empowerment, and there will be a big choice between global solidarity and nationalist isolation.”

    It looks to me as if we are already in the Totalitarian Surveillance camp and if Carter has his way the Global Security gang will follow shortly!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/02/11/covid-pandemic-risks-repeat-1930s-chaos-says-forces-chief/

  13. Morning all.

    Here are the chest feeding letters….

    SIR – The decision by the Brighton and Sussex University Hospital NHS Trust to use the term “chestfeeding” (report, February 11) displays a worrying ignorance of anatomy and of the English language.

    Men too have a breastbone (sternum). They can also suffer from breast cancer and gynaecomastia. Men and women in the household cavalry wear breastplate armour (cuirass).

    It is about time this NHS trust stopped pandering to the whims of ill-informed minorities, in the name of political correctness, and concentrated instead on improving healthcare.

    Dr Alf Crossman

    Rudgwick, West Sussex

    SIR – My name is Ann. I am a woman and a mother. I have breasts. Is it now illegal to say this?

    Ann Hooper

    Kirby-le-Soken, Essex

    SIR – When 1 per cent of the population can push their agenda and make the rest of us bow to their opinions, I do wonder if it is now time for me to shuffle off this earth.

    I am a woman and have breastfed three children.

    Is there no end to this madness?

    Patricia Spong

    Newcastle upon Tyne

    SIR – Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust objects to “biological essentialism” in childbirth.

    Outside science fiction, is there an alternative?

    Dr John Doherty

    Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire

    SIR – It is a biological fact that only women can give birth, or breastfeed their baby.

    I do recall a case last year when a woman had her gender recognised as male, then became pregnant and gave birth.

    Advertisement

    But I think the number of people who would expunge terms of female identity from the English language must be infinitesimally small. It is definitely not worth deeply upsetting the female half of the population in order for them to be accommodated.

    I feel the Brighton Trust is making a laughing stock of itself and I suggest it reconsiders.

    Alison Day

    Camberley, Surrey

    SIR – I read with some bewilderment the linguistic contortions proposed by the authors of the policy, described as “gender inclusion midwives”.

    What term do they propose to replace “midwives”?

    Tim Turvey

    Manchester

    SIR – I fear that I must now make a clean chest of the fact that I wear double-chested suits.

    David Sayers

    Edzell, Angus

    SIR – Chestfeeding in this household is to delve into the chest freezer and see what’s on offer.

    Lyndi d’Ambrumenil

    Zeals, Wiltshire

    1. Ann Hooper, no but you might be thrown out of a bar if you wear a T shirt saying “Woman; adult human female” or you might be prosecuted for hate crime if you distribute leaflets or stickers with this dictionary description.

    3. “When 1 per cent of the population can push their agenda and make the rest of us bow to their opinions…”

      Patricia Spong

      Watch my lips. I bow to no one whose opinions are foisted upon me.

      No one!

      1. But Mrs Spong is right, and we have to fight back. Typical British Don’t-bother-me-I’m-too-busy-with-my-beer attitude has landed us in this mess.

        1. She is correct in saying that they are attempting to make us bow. What she didn’t say is that they are failing, miserably, to make those of us with brains and independent thinking do so.

          1. Yes, sorry I confused the letters for a moment. “They” want us to shuffle of this mortal coil as fast as possible of course, to make way for our replacements. F them, I do not intend to oblige either.

          3. Yes, sorry I confused the letters for a moment. “They” want us to shuffle of this mortal coil as fast as possible of course, to make way for our replacements. F them, I do not intend to oblige either.

    4. ‘Morning, Epi. This is just a couple of the leading BTL comments on this subject, and there’s plenty more where they came from…

      Angus Long
      12 Feb 2021 1:04AM
      In JK Rowling’s ‘The Goblet of Fire’, Professor Dumbledore counsels the troubled Harry Potter, pondering a difficult decision, by telling him it is sometimes harder to do what is right, than what is easy. Although plucked from a work of popular fiction this is, in my view, an uncanny metaphor for many an attitude and work ethic of today.

      It’s my view that most of the public sector is far happier to waste what finite time, money and resources it has on pointless PC Wokness than delivering the key public services we all rely on.

      Oh yes, far “easier” to prattle on about chestfeeding than making sure there is sufficient care in the community or shelters for the homeless etc…

      Fact is, pointless political correctness is becoming an institutional canker offering precious little benefit but much detriment to our national psyche. It is fast becoming a bureaucratic joke, but it isn’t funny. We can have all the rights in the world, do as little as possible and sue each other for as much as possible – but sooner or later we’ll wake up and realise we have no more wealth creating industries left, because while we are fussing about trying to create a self imposed society of comfort living sybarites in a pain-free utopia, the studious people of Asia and other developing nations are simply and diligently getting on with a day’s work – Thereby making them more efficient, profitable and attractive to investors?

      There are no easy answers, and I don’t purport to have them all; but I do believe that if our industry, economy and society, as a whole, wants to reclaim its industrial and economic heritage we need to be led by fewer students of political correctness and more graduates in common sense.

      Alan Measles
      12 Feb 2021 1:01AM
      Brighton and Sussex University Hospital NHS Trust has been wasting millions of pounds of public money on ridiculous equality projects for years. Look up the case of their race equality ‘champion’ who did very little for her massive salary except stoke up grievances and who was eventually sacked for being racist against a white manager and lost an employment tribunal. She cost them millions in legal fees and payouts over the years. BSUH needs to be investigated for wasting more public funds on creating posts that are designed purely to promote trans ideology and other politically inspired projects. This must stop. Their credibility is shot to pieces. Who will step in and stop this appalling institution from heading further down this path?

      1. The point is a good one, but dear God! we are now quoting from some of the most unoriginal books ever written by a politically correct lefty as though they were Shakespeare!

      2. It’s okay, Angus; Thayaric doesn’t think we need wealth creating industries because the state can provide

    7. Breasts are mounted on chests. They are different pieces of anatomy. Chests do not, and cannot, lactate, being a bony cavity. These people are crazed.
      Why this sudden desire to eliminate all the female in the language and country? Ex-men competing in women’s sports, dressing in their dressing-rooms, and now attempts to bugger the language about to eliminate more female aspects.

  15. ‘Morning, Peeps.

    Cladding: who pays?

    SIR – Evidence in the public domain suggests that developers, builders and their suppliers are liable for the removal of unsafe cladding (report, February 10).

    Surely there should be a special levy on the industry to pay for this, or is it to fall on the taxpayer as usual?

    Nigel Griffiths
    Ware, Hertfordshire

    SIR – As a builder, I find it astonishing that blame has not been apportioned. The system is a simple one.

    We obtain planning permission, then instruct an architect to design the building and specify the materials to be used. The architect is responsible for checking the suitability of the materials with the manufacturers. Once plans and materials have been approved by local authority building inspectors, so that everything meets building regulations, we start to build.

    In cases of dangerous cladding, if the architect specified the wrong product for the location, it should be easy to find out. If the manufacturers supplied or specified materials that were not suitable, it should also be easy to check – as it should if the builder has not installed the product according to the manufacturer or architect’s instructions, or the local authority has not checked the plans and suitability of materials for the location.

    Those of the above who are liable should be paying for the replacements and repairs.

    Reg Hunt
    Terling, Essex

    SIR – What is the purpose of building surveys if they do not identify flammable cladding on apartment blocks to prospective purchasers? Will surveyors join architects, builders and quantity surveyors in escaping legal action by countless leaseholders and owners?

    Stephen Howey
    Woodford Green, Essex

    Quite so, Reg Hunt; rocket science it certainly isn’t.

    1. Two very good letters. Most of the surveyors that I’ve come across have been completely incompetent.

      2. You also need to differentiate between surveyors generally and conveyancers, and a surveyor and a chartered surveyor.

        In my experience (working in the construction industry), surveyors are essentially the jack of all trades and masters of none (not their fault) and thus their knowledge and experience is rather limited (meaning they should only get involved at a relatively low level in design or inspection work), whereas chartered surveyors have a significantly larger amount of experience and knowledge, including a specialism in one aspect of their work – rather like an engineer. They would also actively manage the work of the lower experience surveyors.

        One thing I noticed over my career (I jacked it in a few years ago because I was disgusted at the way the industry was going) was that supervision of less experienced staff has gardually reduced – less on-the-job training and especially checking of work, often relying on a nod and a wink to get work ‘out the door’ on time because of unrealistic work timescales and low initial fees for work.

        This often results in shoddy work being released to clients/design teams and frequent revisions being carried out, often without the knowledge of other design team members, even whilst construction work is ongoing. For the most part, it is allowed to happened and the cost of doing so is shared around under the guise of ‘changed requirements’ or ‘unforeseen problems’. That is mainly BS to cover up bad management and planning, as well as a race to the bottom on bid prices whilst simultaneously factoring in a decent amount of ‘extras’ to cover said shoddy work.

        I had one of three options open to me:

        1. To go along with the BS and possibly sully my professional reputation or even go to prison because I cut corners to meet targets/deadlines.

        2. Ruin my health (physical and mental) over the short and longer term by either working too fast anmd/or working extremely long hours on an ongoing basis to get the work done to a decent standard. I’ve worked with many engineers who’ve had serious health problems as a result of this – two of which died before they were 50. The stress of it can be just as bad as the physical (exhaustion) of it. Others have had serious problems with socialisation – marraige breakups and not getting on with work colleagues.

        3. Accept that you’ll get a lot of stick from your own management and from some clients by being honest and saying you cannot reasonably do the work in the time set, keep to that but do a good job of the work. This, of course, will likely not do your career any good as you will likely be labelled as a trouble-maker and not a ‘team player’ – even if you bring up the issue privately and offer sensible solutions.

        Most managers won’t implement such plans because doing so essentially proves their previous incompetence, and we can’t have that dirty linen being aired. This is likely why Grenfell happened – people in various jobs knew there were problems – poor design or construction, poorly though out fire safety via box-ticking, no incentive to report issues.

        I took option 2 for a while until my own health started to be compromised, then option 3 until I’d had enough taking the heat for my managers’ failings. I then took a new option 4 – to leave the industry. I suspect that many experienced staff in their 40s and older are currently doing some soul-searching as to whether to do the same, assuming things return to some sort of normality post-pandemic (if that happens at all).

        One thing I noticed was that both well before and after the 2008 financial crash (which affected the construction indsutry harder than most) in better times was the very high turnover of staff, especially those under 50. No-one ever has paid any attention to the reasons for that.

    2. The purpose of building surveys, and indeed the entire planning and building control infrastructure as it has evolved in post-Thatcher market-led times when all must be “run as a business” and never mind ethics, is to make life miserable for self-builders and to drive out small local competitors in favour of the big boys who can afford professionals from the Team, who are “one of us”.

      It is entirely corrupt, and we are allowing it.

    3. Surveys are a joke.
      When we bought our first house, we had to send the surveyor back as he called it an “end-of-terrace” house, when it was a semi-detached. If he couldn’t see that, what faith does one have in the rest of the survey?
      He also said we should tie the ourside walls of the kitchen to the centre wall, as it might fall out (no cracks after 120 years, but hey). When I called him to identify what he meant by that (tie at every joist? every second? at each end of the room? and what was the point, since the joists were continuous through to next door & would just pull through the wall), he responded by “Do what you want”. So we did.

    4. Reg Hunt completely on the mark (I essentially said the same in comments on yesterday’s blog) – Nigel Griffiths isn’t (because all that any levy would mean is that the industry would just pass it on to customers, one way or the other).

  16. ‘Morning again,

    SIR – The Royal Horticultural Society recommends restraint in spraying garden bugs (report, February 10). One year, disheartened by caterpillars on my cabbages, I offered local children sixpence a dozen for picking them off the plants. The price was renegotiated when they arrived at my door with bucketfuls of them – all very alive.

    Shirley Puckett
    St Michaels, Kent

    Shirley Puckett (careful how you say that) I would keep your head down if I were you – an accusation of child slave labour cannot be long in coming…

    1. My parents made the same mistake with thistles in our garden when we were children. They did cough up though.

  17. Thrown to the dogs

    SIR – A friend of mine with a business in Northern Ireland was telling me about the major obstacles created by the EU protocol for importing from the UK mainland (Letters, February 11).

    It’s outrageous that a part of our country has been thrown to the dogs. There has to be a better solution.

    Peter Wiltshire
    Binfield, Berkshire

    Fear not, Peter Wiltshire: yesterday’s talks with the EU have been reported as “Frank but constructive”. In other words it was a shouting match and the only agreement was on the form of the joint press release. Some way to go, I think.

  18. To all you musicians out there in this freezing weather. Be careful when walking on that ice.

    If you don’t C♯ you’ll soon B♭.

    3. Not a song title ……….
      My guitars keep going out of tune due to the temperatures fluctuations over night.

    1. I reckon the NHS kills or damages almost as many as it saves, going on the results from my family. Excellent, it is not.

  20. Here is yet another albeit brutal cure for low blood pressure:

    Churchill College panel claims wartime PM was a white supremacist leading an empire ‘worse than the Nazis’

    Cambridge’s Churchill College, established with the help of the leader in 1958, organised a discussion on the wartime Prime Minister

    By
    Craig Simpson
    11 February 2021 • 7:41pm

    Winston Churchill was a white supremacist leading an empire “worse than the Nazis”, according an academic panel at a Cambridge college named in his honour.

    The former Prime Minister was immersed in a “white supremacist philosophy” of which he was the “perfect embodiment”, according to panellists discussing his legacy at a Churchill College event.

    The group chaired by college fellow Prof Priyamvada Gopala, criticised in 2020 for claiming on social media that “white lives don’t matter… as white lives”, was branded biased before the event began for omitting defenders of the wartime leader.

    Panellists for the “Racial Consequences of Mr Churchill” talk challenged this assumption before accusing the former Prime Minister of racism and complicity in the Bengal Famine which killed three million Indians.

    The Empire he led against Nazi Germany in the Second World War was branded morally poorer than the Third Reich, and the view that a virtuous Britain defeated the genocidal state was deemed a “problematic narrative”.

    Professor Kehinde Andrews, author of The Psychosis of Whiteness, said Churchill was: “The perfect embodiment of white supremacy”.

    He claimed that this supremacist view dominated the politics of the day, and currently dominates in post-Imperial Britain, adding: “The British Empire far worse than the Nazis and lasted far longer.

    “That’s just a fact. But if you state something like that it’s like heresy.”

    Panellists agreed that discussing Churchill was an emotive subject because he had become beyond reproach, something which belied a historical problem of “lionising dead white men”, according to Prof Andrews.

    Fellow panellist Dr Onyeka Nubia noted that Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples made use of the language of white supremacy through the veiled terms “English Speaking Peoples” and “Anglo-Saxon”.

    Dr Madhusree Mukerjee argued that the Prime Minister viewed Indians as “rabbits”, and his policies had a direct role in the Bengal Famine of 1943.

    She further argued that “militarism is the core of the British identity”, and statues celebrating this should be taken down, adding: “It was the Soviets who defeated the Nazis and the Americans who defeated the Japanese.”

    Historian Dr Zareer Masani wrote to the Cambridge College before the event warning that its panel lacked historical expertise and aimed only to “vilify” Churchill.

    Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny, described the panels’ claims as “libels” that are “entirely factually incorrect”.

    He added: “A white supremacist wants bad things to happen to non-whites… Churchill fought to protect the hundreds of millions of non-whites in the Empire.

    “If the Japanese had captured India in WW2 would have led to perhaps tens of millions of deaths if their record elsewhere was comparable.’

    “Churchill did his best in the exigencies of wartime to alleviate the Bengal Famine.

    “In his political career he fought again and again against slavery and for the rights of non-whites within the British Empire. Churchill was moreover instrumental in destroying the worst racist in history, Adolf Hitler.”

    Churchill College said that the event was a panel discussion not a debate, and intended as one in a series of events on the leader’s legacy.

    * * * *

    No BTL comments allowed.

    1. Did they say what AH was going to do to the British if he’d won ?

      No, thought not.

      It doesn’t bear thinking about.

      1. Gandhi once wrote to Hitler, “… Nor do we believe that you are the monster described by your opponents.”

        Hitler reciprocated by observing to Lord Halifax, “Shoot Gandhi.’

        3. Entirely consistent with AH’s desire for the British Empire to continue. The British and US leadership didn’t agree with him of course

      2. We’ve been encouraged to conflate AH winning with Britain being invaded. This is because we are supposed to think saving Britain was the same thing as defeating Germany. In fact they are far from the same thing at all but we’re not supposed to think about that if the propaganda of the last 80+ years is anything to go by.

        1. It’s hard for me to think of WW2 as anything but an ongoing tragedy for everyone involved. It never had to happen, and even the winners lost everything. When western civilization defeated itself.

    2. We all know that Aydolph loved his dog (Blondi, not Eva Braun).
      Other human beings – not so much.

    3. Best close Churchill College then, fire all the staff. They wouldn’t want to be associated with that name, surely?
      Worse than the Nazis, eh? A fact, eh? Arseholes.

  21. Good morning, all. Grey sky – and a bit of snow falling – dagnabbit. Still, the paper arrived.

    Not much news – except about white supremacists, of course, as is only right and proper. Black Love Murders.

    2. By playing God Save The Queen doesn’t mean the England side claims ownership, does it?
      It’s not our fault the other parts of the United Kingdom have decided they want their own populist anthem and are unhappy they we haven’t followed their lead.

      1. If the steering committee of my local football club ruled that ‘Kick Them Niggers in the Goolies’ was an appropriate anthem (and adequately expressing our robust sense of sportsmanship when tackling Premier League opponents), would my club be kicked out of the League?

        1. I wasn’t aware that someone had written that anthem yet.
          Whenever I have been to Twickenham to watch England play every England supporter proudly sings God Save The Queen as I do too.
          I haven’t heard of anyone that wants to change it.

        1. If it annoys the Left, republicans and those that want to stamp on the faces of anyone that sticks up for our great country, what is the problem?

          1. It shouldn’t be solemn, it should be rousing, like the Italian anthem.

            Rousing and happy; not music to slash your wrists by!

          3. Hmm, I do remember my dear departed Mother remarking that the Italian National Anthem sounded like a badly tuned dance band.

    3. By playing God Save The Queen doesn’t mean the England side claims ownership, does it?
      It’s not our fault the other parts of the United Kingdom have decided they want their own populist anthem and are unhappy they we haven’t followed their lead.

  24. They had the Chief Executive of HS2 on this morning. His accent was that of a union boss, but it seems they have all been promoted now under the new regime. Following Parliament’s approval of the extension of HS2 to Phase 2:

    1. Parliament has loads of money.
    2. Loads of jobs by spending loads of money.
    3. My £600,000 a year job is ringfenced.
    4. Market towns in the North can get stuffed.
    5. Anyone hoping for public money in hard times or tax concessions can get stuffed.
    6. Parliament will swallow anything, and the electorate can do nothing about it.
    7. Nothing is to be said about the environmental effect on the route any more than for London to Birmingham, and objectors will be silenced.
    8. Of course we need more jobs (especially for chief executives on ringfenced remuneration) even when we don’t need zil lane railways.
    9. Zil lanes add capacity.

    Am I allowed to deduce that putting Starmer into Opposition guarantees the uselessness of Parliament to represent the nation with any honour for the foreseeable future?

      1. At least in the Sainted Maggie’s time when Labour were preoccupied with combatting the Marxist entryism of Militant, she had a fairly effective opposition in the pre-Blair vandalism House of Lords.

    2. I see they have cancelled the £ 27 billion plans for road improvements on environment grounds, yet they plough ahead with this EU directive without any care for the environment

      1. They’re going ahead with the conversion of large parts of the motorway network into death traps though.

        1. Son of Henry, I guess.

          This is a measure of how little time I have spent sitting on a sofa since my children were born. I thought Mike Atherton was still the cricket captain.

      2. He is a Sheffielder, from Dore (the posh part), who supports the wrong football team (Sheffield United).

        BTW: if da comes from Sheffild [sic] da sez Dore as “Doer”, da knaws!

        1. TBH, I loathe cricket with a passion. I’d rather watch competitive grass-growing, there’s more action.

  26. From the DT…sorry ladies, this is one for the chaps. I only include it here because many Nottlrs are of a certain age:

    Prostate scan breakthrough could prevent thousands of cancer deaths every year, landmark study finds

    Scientists at Imperial College London have developed a 15-minute MRI scan, known as a Prostagram, which can detect the disease early

    By
    Phoebe Southworth
    11 February 2021 • 5:00pm

    A prostate scan breakthrough could save thousands of men from dying of cancer every year, a landmark study has found.

    Scientists at Imperial College London have developed a 15-minute MRI scan, known as a Prostagram, which can detect the disease early – much like a female mammogram.

    It is far less invasive than current examination methods, such as a rectal examination, and could lead to an extra 40,000 cases of prostate cancer being identified every year.

    This is the first time that any scan has been accurate enough to be considered for use as a prostate cancer screening test.

    The landmark trial involved 408 men in the UK having the short, non-invasive scan using innovative resonance imaging (MRI).

    The technique is modelled on breast cancer screening, which invites women to have a mammogram scan every three years as part of a national programme.

    It was found to pick up twice as many prostate cancers compared with the standard prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood test, which is a common method of diagnosis currently used.

    At the moment, men who are suspected of having prostate cancer may also be asked to provide a urine sample and have a digital rectal examination by their doctor.

    If the patient is found to have a raised PSA level, they may be referred for an MRI scan, which takes around 40 minutes, potentially followed by a biopsy.

    Researchers hope this less intrusive MRI scan method will encourage men to come forward if they have potential symptoms of prostate cancer. These include the need to urinate more frequently, feeling the bladder has not fully emptied, and blood in urine or semen.

    Prof Hashim Ahmed, chair of urology at Imperial College London, said: “Prostagram has the potential to form the basis of a fast, mobile national screening programme for prostate cancer and could be a game-changer.

    “Prostagram also has the potential to detect more aggressive cancers earlier and pass over the many cancers which don’t need to be diagnosed. By finding these aggressive cancers at the earliest opportunity, men have the opportunity to be offered less invasive treatments with fewer side effects.”

    Some 12,000 men die from prostate cancer every year, with the figure overtaking breast cancer deaths (11,000) during the last decade.

    The worrying increase means men should also have access to a national screening programme, the researchers said.

    Black men are at an increased risk of prostate cancer and almost a third of the trial participants were black.

    Dr David Eldred-Evans, who helped develop the Prostagram, said: “The encouraging results of this research study bring a mass screening programme for prostate cancer, equivalent to mammogram testing for women, a step closer.

    “A major achievement for the trial was the recruitment of ethnic minority and lower socio-economic participants broadly equivalent to their proportion within the community, which could be replicated in future general population screening trials.

    “Plans for a more extensive trial covering 20,000 men are well advanced and will proceed in the coming months subject to funding. If results from this study are similar or better than those revealed today, there is then a clear pathway to the widespread implementation of Prostagram into the general population.”

    The findings were published in the journal Jama Oncology.

    * * * *

    I’m not sure that this is neccessarily a radical improvement. Three and a half years ago a raised (and rising) PSA in my case resulted in an MRI scan. Shortly after that they took 21 biopsies, the procedure for which defies description (and anyway would also ruin your breakfast). Just before these were taken I asked to see the scan on the doctor’s screen, which clearly showed three distinctly darker areas. The conversation went something like this: “Okay Doc, you must have seen hundreds of these, what do you reckon?” “That’s coming out, and soon” was his laconic reply. Nevertheless, he still went ahead with the biopsies, which merely confirmed a stage 3/4 cancer.

    Perhaps the MRI was an experimental procedure then…and if so the words “guinea” and “pig” spring to mind. However, I have no complaint as subsequent removal was successful.

    A plea to the chaps – mine was only discovered by accident when I asked for a PSA to be included in some routine blood tests, so get it done anyway! Unlike female breast screening (‘bap snaps’) we men still have no similar routine screening programme, so it’s all down to us to pursue.

    2. HJ, You’re experience mirrors mine to a large extent. I was lucky though to get a second opinion and was able, by changing hospitals (and consultant), to get brachytherapy rather than have the prostate removed. This involved a course of hormone treatment followed by targeted radiotherapy topped off with a surgical procedure that saw them implant 64 radioactive seeds in the prostate to kill the cancer. The treatment was painless and the surgery only involved an overnight stay post op. Four years on, all seems well. If fellow NOTLers find themselves in a similar position, it might be worth finding out if brachytherapy is possible.

      I also highly recommend regular PSA tests as my cancer too was discovered by accident.

      1. Well done, Sean. I did ask about the ‘brachy’ route but the advice from the relevant consultant was that mine was sufficiently advanced to make the outcome uncertain. So it was just over 8 hours under the de Vinci ‘robot’ for total removal.

        Following the (not unexpected) diagnosis I did ask in passing “Is there a ‘do nothing’ option? “Yes, of course, there is always one of those…you might make it to 70 but probably not beyond.” That was now 4 years ago and I shall be 70 in August.

        PS There is now an ultrasound option too, although my surgeon has since said in passing that it’s like brachy – currently it isn’t always successful on the more advanced tumours.

        PPS I have progressed from the quarterly PSA checks, through half-yearly to what is now annual…and this is for life.

    3. I understand from one of my friends that routine breast screening stops at age 70. I would have thought that older women would have been more prone. My mother developed breast cancer at the age of 84.

  27. Good morning all.
    Bright overcast and a tad below -4°C in the yard this morning.

    I’m not going to look at the news yet, it’s too depressing.

  28. The purpose of HS2 is to use public money to enrich politicians and cronies at the back door.

    No HS2 means no enriching which is why Johnson must have it at any price.

    Same as with the privatization of QinetiQ where Tony Blair and George Soros made a fortune. Because Blair sold it dirt cheap and gave QinetiQ a quick bung of $7.5 billion on the day of sale. Without increasing the sale price.

    Who had one of his closest friends on the board of HS2 Ltd?

    George Soros.

    Strange coincidence !

    1. HS2 is part of a Europe wide network of rail motorways, I think. They are fighting similar battles in other parts of Europe, but nobody seems to realise that it’s all part of a grand plan, and can’t be changed.

      1. Sure, and why is that ?

        Giant public spending projects release vast quantities of public money.

        Those at the top direct where it goes and everyone gets a cut.

        That’s why the plan can’t be changed.

        If you read the inquiry into QinetiQ, you will see there’s loads of hush money for senior staff while Tony and George get the lion’s share.

        Same with HS2 except much more.

        After all, why do you think Jean Claude Juncker built a secretive no questions asked tax free no customs high security depository on the Belgium Luxembourg border ?

        It’s for politicians and cronies to store loot.

        1. I have heard from a couple of landowners along the route about the ridiculous sums being squandered on HS2.

      2. Sure, and why is that ?

        Giant public spending projects release vast quantities of public money.

        Those at the top direct where it goes and everyone gets a cut.

        That’s why the plan can’t be changed.

        If you read the inquiry into QinetiQ, you will see there’s loads of hush money for senior staff while Tony and George get the lion’s share.

        Same with HS2 except much more.

        After all, why do you think Jean Claude Juncker built a secretive no questions asked tax free no customs depository on the Belgium Luxembourg border ?

        It’s for politicians and cronies to store loot.

    2. If only it was only George Soros’s snout that was in the trough. Then they could shoot him, and we’d all be out of our misery.

      The whole point of a monarchy was that the parasites could be contained, and the rest of us could get on with being useful. Furthermore, the principle of Noblesse Oblige that directs our constitutional monarchy requires the monarch to care well for the hand that feeds her, so it is a sort of symbiosis that actually has evolved to work rather well.

      It’s not infallible though. Thailand went through a tricky patch after King Bhumibol expired. The passing of King George V was a bit dicey for a while. While I have confidence in the good will of Charles and William, and the Cambridge children are turning out quite nicely, we could have ended up with Harry and Meghan, or Andrew and Fergie and their daughters.

  30. Anyway, Johnson’s bank balance should be going up nicely.

    It looks very likely the UK is already in Agenda 21 Great Reset which his best friend Gates wanted.

    So Boros has got himself a lovely little earner selling off policy just like his predecessors.

    What’s not to like ?

    Ummmm…..

    Oh, Boros will soon send a man round to pick up your unnecessary car and boiler.

      1. I think that you should not be allowed to play for a football team unless you were born in the place or until you have lived there for at least 10 years.

        What have Manchester United players got to do with Manchester?

        But if we have to accept the oxymoron of the term ‘professional sport’ – i,e. that sport has little to do with sport and everything to do with commerce – then Manchester United is just a brand name like Tesco or Sainsbury. In the spirit of business enterprise then it has occurred to me that goalkeepers and wicket keepers should seek sponsorship deals with Durex.

      2. Inga flugor på dig, Tom, bor.

        They are, indeed, the ‘wrong’ team, if you are a Sheffield Wednesday fan, as I am. Having said that, I bear neither hatred nor ill-will towards The Blades. The only time I wish to see them lose is when they are playing The Owls. At all other times they are a ‘local’ team who I would wish to do well against outsiders. I suppose that coming from an ‘Old Farm’ team, like you do, then hatred of that mob from ‘Silly Suffolk’ is ingrained.

  33. High take up with vaccines…

    BBC reports that places in the SW have an average take up of 96% with over 70’s and 80’s having the jab. A little surprising having read several comments suggesting that many would refuse.

    Ironically…those who devised the global warming scam also determined that culling 95% of the population would be required to save mother earth which shows how the nonstop propaganda is having the desired effect!

    1. Our surgery has just the very occasional no-show; most sessions are fully attended (out of 13,000 slots so far) but if there is a gap then they phone round for ‘extras’ to fill the gaps. There is no shortage of takers, and the comments as they leave are overwhelmingly positive.

      1. The beauty of a vaccine is that nobody knows what’s in it…

        Different ingredients for different reasons.

  37. In the Radio 4 news today an epidemiologist in Australia has described the UK’s relaxation of the detention protocols for the travellers arriving from the “Red” countries as unfit for purpose as the protocols for Australian visitors in hotel detention had to be tightened – guards were actually sleeping with visitors in their bedrooms. In the UK, detainees, in hotels will be allowed to go outside to smoke and get fresh air. Guards will not be tested for Covid regularly. In Australia guards are tested daily, free of charge, now as some have become affected in the hotels and have gone back home to spread the disease. The “UK” Covid variant seems to be the main culprit.
    Some Vaccination centres in the UK are only getting about 5-10% of the numbers of arms to inject as they expected.
    Distancing protocols may be required until the Autumn in the UK.
    The whole medical and political decisions are a complete shambles and destroying this country’s heath, economy and quality of life.
    Johnson must go.
    .

    2. I don’t understand why the guards were sleeping in the same room. That would put them at more risk surely?

      I don’t think i would like to share a hotel room with a stranger. Or have i read it wrong?

          1. That reminds me of a 60s party I went to a a few years ago, a lady arrived in the clothes she wore back in the day. But were no longer adequate in the purpose.
            Most of us there hoped she didn’t drop anything.

      2. Morning Phizee – “sleeping” is a euphemism The guards pulled on their breeches afterwards and went home to their loving wives with the Covid virus. I know you are pulling my leg but just in case, I rest my defence.

    3. There is currently a supply problem with vaccines, the manufacturers can’t keep up with the additional centres being set up. I only know this ‘cos Mrs HJ and I are doing frequent stints at our GP surgery, which is required to cover 7 GP areas, and they have had to stop for a few days because of this.

    4. 329311+ up ticks,
      Morning C,
      “The johnson must go” leading the whole in-house group
      as in the coalition ALL 649 of them.

      1. They are to be allowed out to smoke and to move about in the hotel presumably social distancing and wearing masks. Australia tried that but had to tighten up the restrictions to , I would think, unbearable conditions, after outbreaks resulting from hotel guards taking the Covid virus home

        1. Australia managed to attribute a grand total of 909 deaths to Covid. That makes a complete nonsense of the whole regime. “Cases” are spurious since the testing methods used can’t identify infection anyway.

        2. I thought they all had to stay in their rooms the whole time and have food delivered to the room.

  38. It’s amusing people think HS2 is happening because of a grand European plan to improve rail without asking why..

    The European plan is not to improve transportation, it’s to release public money for purposes of corruption…

    That’s why politicians won’t change it !

    1. 329311+ up ticks,
      Morning PP,
      Then surely change the politicians… on a regular basis, very regular, until such times as…….

  40. Note On The Fridge

    I awoke this morning to find that my wife had left a note on the refrigerator.

    “It’s not working! I can’t take it anymore! I’ve gone to stay at my mother’s house!”

    So, I opened the fridge, the light came on, and the beer was still cold.

    I don’t have a clue what she is talking about!

    1. In the wake of the numerous occasions which have seen police officers “take the knee” to show solidarity with the oppressed BAME peoples, there have been too many cases of officers reporting sick, suffering from prepatellar bursitis.

      To avoid such painful injuries, doctors recommend that officers kneel on something soft, such as a nigger’s neck.

  42. Second post on BTL Comments

    What term do they propose to replace “midwives”?
    Tim Turvey Manchester

    To ensure thatthe replacement word is totally Woke inclusive, like actress are nowactors, working
    on the T(x)it-for-T(x)at principle, the only word thatcan be used is Midhusbands

    The (x) is included in thet-f-t above as the first word is too crude for the delicate readers of
    ‘comments’ and the post not accepted. What a strange world the DT lives in

    1. Kentucky Fried Chicken is reasonably tasty, but their chips have always been vile!

      Whenever I bought some (years ago in my youth) I would invariably go to the chip shop next door, and buy my chips from there instead.

      1. I think it is franchised. I’ve had it 3 times in my life. first two were tasty but the last time was definitely the last.

        When i bit into the chicken it was slimy. They had obviously sourced the cheapest nastiest they could find.

        I make my own now when i fancy some.

        Marinade in buttermilk first.

        Homemade KFC ingredients

        600g plain flour

        4 tbsp paprika

        2 tbsp white pepper

        2 tbsp garlic powder

        1 tbsp ground ginger

        1 tbsp mustard powder

        1 tbsp celery

        1tbsp salt

        1 tbsp ground black pepper

        ½ tbsp of oregano

        ½ tbsp thyme

        How to make homemade KFC

        Preheat the oven to 80C.

        Add the spices to the flour and mix well.

        Make sure the chicken is at room temperature before seasoning it in the flour and spice mix.

        After coating the chicken in seasoning, brush it with the egg white and milk wash before popping it back in the seasoning.

        Fry the chicken for five to six minutes at 160C before putting it in the preheated oven to keep warm.

        Fry again for 90 seconds before serving.

        Dan’s
        recipe requires you to deep fry the chicken. So if you don’t have a
        deep fat fryer, or would rather be a touch healthier, why not try this slow cooker KFC recipe instead? It’s delicious – trust us, we’ve tried it.

        And if you fancy trying to recreate some other fast foods at home, how about a slow cooker Nando’s peri-peri chicken made at home? Maybe McDonald’s is more your jam, in which case, here’s a recipe for making a Big Mac at home.
        Which means you can have it delivered from your kitchen straight to
        your sofa. And you’ll need something sweet for afters, so remember to
        add a McDonald’s-esque apple pie to your made-at-home-order.

        1. He could have made him self useful eh.
          Mind you it’s quite tidy, perhaps some one else went by in front of him. 😎

    1. We’ve got a wildfire next to our village in the NW Highlands. I’m hoping that Grizzly will post a picture (I can’t). The fire men have it under control now but it was burning through the night and the road was closed. The heather is very dry as we’ve had no snow

        1. Could be a broken piece of glass left by a tourist concentrating the suns rays Eddy – we haven’t had a cloud in the sky for about a week

          2. Try it with a magnifying glass Eddy. There’s still a lot of power in the light of the sun, my solar panels are churning out loads of power.

          3. I’ve done it as a youngster Alec and read about house fires caused by sunlight hitting glass objects on wooden tables through house windows, In warmer weather.
            I’ve been looking at the area on Google earth, it’s very remote and also has many small pine trees especially along side some of the roads.

          4. We cleared six inches of snow off the van an hour ago. The car thermometer said 12 degrees. Almost summery with the blue sky and strong bright sunshine bouncing off the snow.

        1. 10 miles from here it was like those photos which Grizzly uploaded for me. We haven’t seen a cloud for a week.
          Morning Maggie

        1. Last year’s Australian wildfires…

          Well over 100 arrests were made for people lighting them either by accident or on purpose.

          Then the media claims it was global warming what done it.

          1. I know we have good friends who live in Oz and the patterns of the fires were fairly obvious. But strange that there has never been any names of the perpetrators mentioned. Or not !!!

          2. Entirely similar on the West coast of the USA and Alaska. Strangely no fires were noticed in the Canadian stretch.

    4. Two women are caught ‘fornicating’ in car on Dartmoor at 2am in -3C temperatures in breach of Covid rules – while 17 lockdown flouters at Knightsbridge house party are fined total of £13,000
      Police urge people to stop breaking lockdown rules and endangering lives
      Two women were found fornicating in Dartmoor car park in -3C temperatures
      Ill-equipped hikers were rescued in blizzards on Northumberland National Park
      Met Police had to break up 17-strong party at rented house in Knightsbridge

      https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9250351/Couple-caught-having-sex-Dartmoor-2am-3C-temperatures-breach-Covid-rules.html

      3. How do women ‘fornicate’ without having a man present?

        Was he elsewhere, chestfeeding his snowflakes children?

        1. Good afternoon, Grizzly.
          You don’t know and I don’t know;
          what is more is I don’t care!

          The continual, day after day, spread
          of misinformation, the so called MSM
          the continual lies, the, so frigging,
          obvious corruptive
          practises/practices are becoming
          more outrageous each day.

          Shall we be honest…Who gives a
          donkey’s bollocks about women on
          Dartmoor and parties in Knightsbridge?
          I have had this rant before!!

        2. There are so many things I don’t understand ..

          I always assumed to fornicate was a male/female activity .

          Perhaps they are the ones who set fire to Dartmoor ..

          1. There was an old queer from Khartoum,
            Who took a lesbian to his room.
            They argued all night
            As to who had the right
            To do what, with what and to whom.

          3. I’ve always thought that was really all Queen Victoria meant when she said that surely women don’t do that. B*ggery isn’t possible without a penis.

        3. Good afternoon, Grizzly

          Two hers trying to play hymns without an organ?

          And if male to male sexual intercourse is buggery – what is the word for the female equivalent and how do they do it?

          1. Good afternoon, Rastus.

            There is, of course, a technical term for the procedure.

            It’s called Strapadictomy.

          2. I have no idea how they do it, unless with a dildo, but I think it’s called “tipping the velvet” – there was a TV programme about it once.

        4. Good afternoon, Grizzly

          Two hers trying to play hymns without an organ?

          And if male to male sexual intercourse is buggery – what is the word for the female equivalent and how do they do it?

  49. When I was a boy, my favourite comic was 2000AD. The main character is Judge Dredd, the story being set in a futuristic America where millions of miserable, unemployed citizens live in teeming ‘Mega-cities.’ Crime has run rampant, so there is no time for the ‘due process’ of the law. Instead, the police are re-named ‘Judges’ and are empowered to administer instant justice based solely on their evaluation of a crime. This could be anything from a custodial sentence (in an ‘isolation cube’) up to a bullet in the head. The catch-phrase of Judge Dredd is “I am the Law!”

    https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.deviantart.com%2Fadventuresofp2%2Fart%2FJudge-Dredd-I-Am-The-Law-293420925&psig=AOvVaw08OhidUyX9m-U1lM2gsXTr&ust=1613212906290000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAIQjRxqFwoTCKCtmM-U5O4CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAF

    The reason for this little trip down memory lane? Well, it appears that the law is now whatever any individual police officer says it is:

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/02/11/woman-cautioned-fined-driving-seven-miles-take-daughter-walk/?li_source=LI&li_medium=li-recommendation-widget

    Welcome to the future citizen!

    1. All these ridiculous penalties that are “issued” by the plod. Don’t pay them. Challenge them in court. I reckon 75% would be thrown out.

      1. I’m sure I remember reading that 100% of penalties issued during the first lockdown which were challenged were rescinded.

        It is more about the message that it sends. Are the police acting under a law, a regulation, a guideline, just the ‘spirit’ of the regulations? Those two women having coffee had their fines cancelled, but Matt Hancock still backed the police. It creates an environment of fear and uncertainty, even harmless activities like a mother taking her child to the beach can result in a fine. The only safe thing is to do absolutely nothing.

        Arbitrary law decided by decree, this is how totalitarian states behave.

        1. Do not obey these arbitrary, overnight, ridiculous “laws”. They are decrees not laws and Parliament has not debated the latest outrageous £10,000 fine – yet another promise broken.

          Good moaning BTW.

        2. Ask plod for the Statutory Authority, Act of Parliament, section and sub section. That’ll throw them.

      4. I concur and have advised a lot of people, if accused, to opt for court. That would expose the stupidity of the plod and ministers.

    1. Despite the advice from his chums at the WEF that we’ll all own nothing and be happy within 10 years, he’s been bulk-buying farmland in the US. He’s apparently now the largest owner of farmland there. Controlling computer systems, vaccines and now food supply. Maybe he should now be referred to as ‘No.2’, Klaus Schwab being the ‘Dr Evil’ or ‘Blofeld’.

    2. Their argument might have gone down better had they been rather more elequent in making it. If people see others making calm, rational cases for not following the increasingly authoritarian rules and laws that have mostly zip to with health protection, then more will join our side.

      This sort of thing will just be a gold mine for the MSM to make out that it’s just a bunch of nasty pieces of work being selfish and aggressive – whatever the merits of their argument or how near the end of their tether they were.

      1. True – much as I detest the stasi and their belief that they are now allowed to do whatever they like, and bugger the need for any “law” – two big fat blokes swearing disgracefully at a small female is not attractive- however right their cause.

          1. I have always advised clients that, should they be stopped or hassled or annoyed by a perlicething (note neutral suffix…!) to be scrupulously polite. Then clobber them through the courts.

          2. Quite right, it was just my little joke.

            BTW it’s interesting that you always advised your clients to be scrupulously polite when they were stopped by the police. Now I’m wondering what sort of clients you had that they should need such advice.

            ‘Consigliere’, were you?
            ;¬)

    2. zazzle.com
      I have had my lower face photographed and printed on a mask. It amuses shop assistants and the like.

  53. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/46d5acfdbd3233d83e2423c89f11003e338aa9b86493f39eddd6d62271c21e73.png https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e26d17fefd32e033698297c385d6bb6f57e74be3b17f83990d5f73afad8025b6.png Our good friend, Spikey, has asked me to post these two photographs from his area.

    The first shows the current extent of snowfall in Scotland (Wester Ross, where Spikey lives, is circled in red and is snow-free).
    The second shows Spikey’s snow-free area which is suffering wildfires to the dry heather!

    1. Golly. He must spend the day dreaming under the palm trees, if the smoke blows the other way, that is.

  54. More anti-Trump lies from the left wing media now being parroted (like many before on this subject, the sham Impeachment mk2 and others about ‘conservatives’ [e.g. the Covington kids ‘incident’]) by the MSM generally, like the DT:

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/02/12/donald-trump-nearly-put-ventilator-covid-white-house-claimed/

    Notive how all the lies, ahem ‘claims’ are in ‘quote marks’ (to presumably avoid being sued), which themselves are likely to be made up claims by the likes of CNN, MSNBC, The NYT, Washington Post or their pals in the never-Trumper part of the GoP. Funny how a man ‘on the cusp of going on a ventilator’ was back at work and vigorously campaining publicly (unlike his [IMHO] basement-dwelling senile opponent) within under a week.

    Given he is of a similar build to Boris Johnson and obviously has a similar working life, he fared much better after contracting the virus. That he was taking hydroxychloroquine and likely zinc & vitamin D seemed to help him recover far quicker than our PM. Hmmm.

    1. President (sic) Trump was pictured playing golf yesterday. This shows that he is not afraid of the lies and vindictive disinformation perpetrated by the left.
      It also shows that he is treating the whole charade with the contempt that it deserves.

      Good for him!

      1. President Trump is correct. Only those ignorant ill-mannered types in the BBC/MSM have referred to the former President as “Trump” or “Donald Trump”. Presidents of the USA retain the honorific “President” after demitting office. The view that the Presidency was “stolen” and that President Trump is still legally President, or the nearest thing to it, confuses things a bit.

  55. Welcome to the Free Speech Union’s weekly newsletter. This newsletter is a brief round-up of the free speech news of the week sent to our members.

    Thou shalt speak no evil… of the NHS

    The Labour Party demanded that Health Secretary Matt Hancock return a £32,000 donation from the Chairman of the Institute of Economic Affairs after a report from the think tank said that the NHS was “nothing special” and that “there is no rational basis for the adulation the NHS is currently receiving”. The report, by Dr Kristian Niemietz, pointed out that the countries that have performed the best during the coronavirus crisis – Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore – do not have national health services. Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner insisted that “Matt Hancock must condemn this report and return the money he has taken from the Chair of the IEA”. Mark Littlewood, the Director General of the IEA (and a member of the FSU’s Advisory Council), said: “The idea that a volunteer chair of a think tank should not be able to donate his own money to causes he believes in is both absurd and corrosive.”

    Compulsory vaccination and free speech

    Writing in UnHerd, Barrister Adam King explores the legal issues around making vaccines compulsory, warning that it cannot be left to the discretion of employers. There is, King argues, a clear parallel with free speech: just as employers should not be able to dictate what their employees say outside the workplace, they shouldn’t be able to dictate that their employees get vaccinated, particularly in professions where there is little risk of Covid transmission. The difficulty, King points out, is that there’s a domino effect: if a sufficient number of employers insist on it, then all will insist on it. “If everyone you might conceivably work for… requires you to uphold ‘their’ ‘values’ in all visible areas of your life, you will have little choice but to comply,” he writes. King says that at the very least no employer should insist on their workers getting vaccinated in the absence of an Act of Parliament requiring them to do so. He concludes: “To treat these issues as something for employers’ discretion rather than as a matter of Public Law not only deprives us of the appropriate protections in the trial process, but also – and more worryingly – evades proper consideration (public and parliamentary) of the balances to be struck.”

    The Law Commission backs down

    The Law Commission of England and Wales has rowed back from proposing an extension of hate speech prohibitions into people’s private homes. The FSU has been campaigning against this for months and is relieved that the Commission has come to its senses. Lord Justice Green, Chairman of the Commission, said: “The criminal team is looking at alternative ways in which the law might be reformed in order to ensure that these laws, which criminalise only the most serious forms of incitement, are compatible with both the right to freedom of expression and respect for one’s home and private and family life.”

    Unfortunately, this is only one of numerous changes the Law Commission is proposing that will undermine free speech. For instance, it is still recommending an expansion of the number of protected characteristics, potentially to include “gender, age, subcultures such as goths and sexual fetishists, and asexual people”, and urging the Government to change the law so that people can be prosecuted under the Public Order Act 1986 if their words are “likely to” stir up hatred against any of these groups, whether they intended them to or not. You can read the FSU’s briefing note on the Commission’s proposals here.

    Captain Tom Moore

    After expressing her refusal to clap in the street “to maintain the fear that imminent death is all around”, despite her admiration for Captain Sir Tom Moore, Beverley Turner became the victim of a Piers Morgan-instigated “Twitter pile-on”. He called her reaction “pathetic” and “pitiful” before he blocked her. She responded in a piece for the Mail, saying, “as a soldier [Sir Tom] fought fascism so that we could live in a ‘free’ country – free to choose how to remember, free to celebrate or commemorate in our own ways”.

    Scottish Police charged 35-year-old Joseph Kelly for tweeting “The only good Brit soldier is a deed one, burn auld fella, buuuuurn” along with a picture of Sir Tom Moore. Actor and founder of Reclaim Laurence Fox tweeted: “The police should be free to do their jobs, which is investigate actual crime, not arresting idiots who tweet idiotic things. Freedom of speech is the cornerstone of any open society. Protect it, even if you don’t like or agree with it.”

    Re-education of the elderly

    In a piece for the Critic, FSU General Secretary Toby Young tells the story of 74-year old John, who was ostracised by a charity in South London for failing to take offence at a Dutch tradition. The charity, which exists to introduce elderly people to their younger neighbours to tackle social isolation and loneliness, has apparently taken on a new mission – to re-educate its elderly beneficiaries. In a Zoom call organised by the charity, someone brought up the subject of Zwaarte Piet (Black Peter), a character who appears in street markets and department stores in Holland and the other low countries at Christmas time wearing blackface. The majority of the group condemned this “racist stereotype”, but not John who said he didn’t find the character particularly offensive. He subsequently got a phone call asking him to apologise and pledge to mend his ways. When he refused to comply, he received a follow-up letter telling him he wouldn’t be welcome at the charity’s events any more.

    Inherent racism

    A mobbing has taken place at the University of North Texas that demonstrates a fundamental problem in higher education, according to Bruno Chaouat, a Professor of French and Jewish Studies at the University of Minnesota.

    The academic at the centre of the controversy is Professor Timothy Jackson, an expert on Heinrich Schenker, the German music theorist, and the co-editor of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies. Jackson’s sin was to devote a special issue of the Journal to discussing a lecture by Professor Philip Ewell, a black music theorist, who accused Schenker of being an ethno-nationalist and demanded that the music curriculum be “decolonised”, with classical composers being replaced by hip hop artists. Jackson’s robust critique of Ewell’s proposals resulted in him being denounced in three open letters, including one signed by everyone of note in the field of music theory, as well as being investigated by his own department. He is now fighting back with a lawsuit against his tormentors.

    In an article in Quillette, Professor Chaouat argues that “decolonising” the music theory curriculum in the hope of interesting more students of colour in the field is condescending to those students and is based on an impoverished conception of education. The point of liberal education, according to Chaouat, is to broaden students’ horizons, introducing them to new and unfamiliar ideas, not to “teach” them about material they’re already acquainted with. This approach, he says, is “precisely what Timothy Jackson and his colleagues in music theory have been doing with their students for decades”.

    Another free speech failure at the New York Times

    Science reporter Donald McNeil has resigned from the New York Times because he used the N-word in front of high school students during an educational field trip in 2019. Even though he used it when asking a student to clarify a story she was telling about a 12 year-old who was punished for using the same word – he asked whether she had used it to insult someone, or whether she was quoting rap lyrics unthinkingly – he was judged to have crossed a line by the New York Times, which said in a statement “we do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent”. After the paper received a complaint about the incident two years ago, it investigated it and reprimanded McNeil, but did not fire him. However, after the episode was dredged up again by the Daily Beast last week, a group of Times journalists demanded a second investigation and McNeil resigned rather than face another inquisition.

    Pen America, an organisation that defends freedom of expression, said: “Recognizing that words can be jarring and hurtful even absent any ill-will, intent and context are nonetheless essential to evaluating the import of speech and determining what consequences it should bear. For reporter Donald McNeil to end his long career, apparently as a result of a single word, risks sending a chilling message.”

    To compound it’s cowardice, the New York Times spiked an article by its op ed columnist Bret Stephens criticising the decision. Happily, someone has leaked it to the New York Post. “A hallmark of injustice is indifference to intention,” writes Stephens. “Most of what is cruel, intolerant, stupid and misjudged in life stems from that indifference.

    Attack on Conservative Student at the University of Toronto

    A student at the University of Toronto – Arjun Singh – has been denounced by fellow students after he was awarded a $1000 scholarship from the Political Science Department. An open letter, written by 13 students, claims his views are “racist, sexist, xenophobic, and deeply harmful to the groups this award claims to support”. The letter, addressed to three senior professors, demands that the award be rescinded. Writing in Quillette, Michael Humeniuk analyses the charge sheet point-by-point, dismantling each claim. But he points out that even though the University has decided not to take back the scholarship, the letter writers have “made the exercise of free speech costlier by showing everyone what can happen to you if you step out of line ideologically”.

    High risk

    The Students’ Union at Durham University has instituted a new policy requiring the vetting of “high risk” speakers. Any potential speaker deemed “controversial” must be reported to the SU two weeks in advance of the event, which may then be cancelled at the SU’s discretion. According to the Durham SU Opportunities Officer Anna Marshall, the purpose of the change is to “protect freedom of speech on campus”. A spokesperson for the Free Speech Union is quoted in the story: “The problem with tightening restrictions around external speakers is they’re never applied consistently. The reality is only conservative speakers will have to jump through all these hoops. It’s no-platforming by stealth, the student union equivalent of shadow banning people they disagree with.”

    GC Academia Network, which promotes open critical discussion of sex-based rights, is calling for anonymous submissions from university staff and students who believe women’s rights and trans rights can sometimes come into conflict with each other. The organisation is concerned about “a ‘no debate’ culture in academia” and asks: “What is it like to take a gender critical position in higher education? What are your experiences of speaking out or keeping quiet? We’d like to know what has happened to you, what you’ve witnessed, and how it has made you feel?”

    Upcoming launch events

    The Free Speech Champions, the new initiative headed by Inaya Folarin Iman that aims to educate students and young people about the importance of free speech, is holding an online launch event on the 18th of February that FSU members are welcome to attend. Called ‘Reimagining the Public Square’, it will run from 7.30 to 9pm. FSU members are encouraged to extend the invitation to any young people they know – it’s free to attend. Speakers include Greg Lukianoff, President of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), Arif Ahmed, the philosophy don who led the successful fight to preserve free speech at Cambridge, and Inaya herself. If you’d like to support the Free Speech Champions programme, you can make a donation here.

    The launch of Andrew Doyle’s new book, Free Speech and Why It Matters, will take place online on the 2nd of March from 7 to 8.30pm. Hosted by the Academy of Ideas, the event is free and will feature Alastair Donald, co-convenor of the Battle of Ideas Festival, interviewing the author. The book is available for purchase in advance of its release on the 25th of February here. Andrew Doyle is a very good egg. In addition to being on the FSU’s Advisory Council, he is the co-host of Comedy Unleashed, the home of free-thinking comedy, and the creator of Titania McGrath, the now world-famous satirical Twitter character.

    Kind regards,

    3. Regarding compulsory vaccination; the politicians do not have the courage to make it compulsory. After all, having made the pharma companies liability-free any ‘fault’ or ‘side effects’, as yet undiscovered in the jabs, would the lead back to them. Easier by far to let the Brigades of clipboard warriors have employees vaccinated as part of their ‘elf’n’safety diktats.
      I suggest that transport companies, hospitality venues and the like will also be put in the position where they will have to be seen to be doing the ‘right thing’ by requesting that customers are jabbed. Again, removing the Westminster clowns from the blame frame.

      As for the ‘hate speech’ in people’s homes, the Shortbread Senate are currently pushing through just such legislation. As I’ve typed elsewhere on numerous occasions; We have freedom of speech or we have censorship. There are libel and slander laws for those who libel or slander. ‘Hate speech’ is nothing but a cop-out for those who do not want to hear alternative opinions or, even more importantly to them, have others exposed to different views.

      1. ‘Hate speech in the home’ will soon be followed by what Orwell warned us of: Thought Police.

        The time for direct action moves even closer.

      2. If you didn’t laugh at some of that you’d have to cry. I like the idea of ‘The Free Speech Champions’.

    4. Allister Heath wrote about the IEA spat yesterday.

      Labour’s shameful lies about the NHS are silencing debate about its failings

      The Tories’ original 1944 plan for a national health service would have served us better in the pandemic

      ALLISTER HEATH

      There is a gigantic, corrosive lie at the heart of British politics, an untruth so great, so debilitating that it all but guarantees that we will remain unprepared for the next calamitous pandemic. This falsehood, propagated principally by Labour but in which the Tories have been complicit out of cowardice, is that any criticism of the NHS’s performance or administrative structure is tantamount to attacking doctors and nurses.

      In this nonsensical, binary world of the Left-wing imagination, you either believe that the NHS is the best possible healthcare system, improvable only by increasing its budget, or you stand accused of hating the very people who have put their lives on the line, working night and day in ICUs, and in vaccination centres. You either worship at the altar of NHS orthodoxy, insisting that it has nothing to learn from any other country, or you are an ungrateful monster, secretly obsessed with importing America’s dystopian healthcare system into Britain.

      There is no space for those of us who are in awe at the selflessness of medical professionals, who believe that NHS workers are heroic and often underpaid by international standards, who reject the insane US mish-mash and yet who believe we need to improve the way we deliver, manage and finance universal healthcare in Britain, for the good of patients, the country and medical staff.

      Yet in the secular, intolerant religion propagated by Labour’s cultish fundamentalists, anything other than unconditional, total adulation of the status quo must be punishable by cancellation. The double-standards are staggering. Patriotism is generally taboo for the Left: they keep telling us how much better Europeans are at everything, from making cars to the generosity of their welfare state. Yet the NHS is the one exception, their own cricket test: to suggest that we could learn from Germany, which has suffered fewer Covid deaths, where 60 per cent of hospitals are private, where citizens choose between a hundred competing insurers, each with different healthcare plans, is to commit an act of heresy. When it comes to healthcare, Labour are nationalistic little Englanders – particularly when the party is struggling in the polls.

      Take the character assassination meted out to Kristian Niemietz of the Institute of Economic Affairs think tank. His rather mild report on how healthcare systems coped with the pandemic concludes that “there is nothing special about the NHS”. It fared worse overall than many, but not all, other countries. He concludes that, when it comes to its performance relative to others, “there is no rational basis for the adulation the NHS is currently receiving, and no reason to be ‘grateful’ for the fact that we have it [rather than a different kind of health system].” This triggered a maelstrom of confected fury: Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner claimed he said “NHS staff don’t deserve our thanks”, a scandalous misrepresentation of what Niemietz actually argued.

      But why are the Tories allowing this madness to continue? They have successfully made the NHS their own again, most spectacularly with Vote Leave’s co-opting of the health service. They ought to be spending some of this capital now: to ensure we don’t implode again come the next pandemic, Tory policy cannot just be about centralisation – including the reversal of previous reforms – and cash.

      Tragically, the party seems not to fully grasp the power of its own history in this area. There is an intriguing black and white portrait hanging on the wall of Matt Hancock’s Whitehall office: it is of Henry Willink, a long-forgotten Tory MP the Conservatives ought, by rights, to be talking a lot more about. As Winston Churchill’s health minister, he is the true inventor of the NHS: it is he, rather than Labour’s Nye Bevan, who should be a household name. Willink’s white paper, a National Health Service, was published in February 1944. That plan was far superior to the version Labour eventually delivered.

      In his Five Giants, Nicholas Timmins recounts how Willink’s plan backed a mixed economy for hospitals: some would be public and others private, though working for the NHS. Crucially, it was “in the most embryonic of forms… an outline of the internal market that the Conservatives finally introduced into the NHS in 1990.”

      In fact, the proposal was even better than that: while municipal hospitals would be taken over by 30 or so boards, “voluntary hospitals” would have been free to contract with them for services. We would have ended up, like in Germany and other nations, with the majority of hospitals privately owned and the NHS the main purchaser; care would still have been free for patients. Willink’s overall vision was imperfect, but it was far less rigid and monolithic than what we ended up with. It would have allowed evolution over time, been far more resilient and open to private sector ideas, money and technologies, and many of today’s problems would not exist. The private-public partnership that did so well with vaccines would have been the norm, rather than an amazing exception.

      Yet Bevan dismissed Willink’s brilliant compromise as “no scheme at all” when he became health secretary. He decreed that all hospitals should be nationalised, an idea occasionally floated since the Thirties but that had never been part of any government or party proposal. This was a socialist putsch by Bevan which, together with a deal he struck with the Royal Colleges, was to lock in a one-size-fits-all system almost no other nation adopted. Willink slammed the hospital nationalisations in the Commons in May 1946, warning that they “will destroy so much in this country that we value” and be a great loss to local communities, to no avail.

      The other great, intolerable lie in British politics, therefore, is that the Tories have never believed in the NHS. They obviously do: they commissioned its original blueprint. But there must be more than one way to be pro-NHS and pro-universal healthcare: it is morally right to reform a system that doesn’t work as well as it could.

      The conspiracy of silence, the bullying, the dissembling: all must end. We need to be able to have an honest conversation on how to improve the NHS. It could be through a Royal Commission; perhaps there could be a referendum. But Covid has shown beyond any possible doubt that change there must be, and that demagogues must no longer be able to halt it.

      https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/02/10/labours-shameful-lies-nhs-silencing-debate-failings/

      2. In my experience of one small corner of the NHS the admin staff and the medical staff had a very easy time. An eight hour shift perhaps equated to five hours work.
        The appearance of Covid-19 has resulted in staff having to work longer, e.g eight hours on an eight hour shift.

        1. As many as that, Horace?

          I trained in Work Study, Statistics and later
          in Accounts…. when sitting in a hospital
          corridor/waiting room? for hours there
          was always plenty of time to check how
          many times a [targeted] person would
          walk past, with a single piece of paper
          in his/her hand!

    5. Allister Heath wrote about the IEA spat yesterday.

      Labour’s shameful lies about the NHS are silencing debate about its failings

      The Tories’ original 1944 plan for a national health service would have served us better in the pandemic

      ALLISTER HEATH

      There is a gigantic, corrosive lie at the heart of British politics, an untruth so great, so debilitating that it all but guarantees that we will remain unprepared for the next calamitous pandemic. This falsehood, propagated principally by Labour but in which the Tories have been complicit out of cowardice, is that any criticism of the NHS’s performance or administrative structure is tantamount to attacking doctors and nurses.

      In this nonsensical, binary world of the Left-wing imagination, you either believe that the NHS is the best possible healthcare system, improvable only by increasing its budget, or you stand accused of hating the very people who have put their lives on the line, working night and day in ICUs, and in vaccination centres. You either worship at the altar of NHS orthodoxy, insisting that it has nothing to learn from any other country, or you are an ungrateful monster, secretly obsessed with importing America’s dystopian healthcare system into Britain.

      There is no space for those of us who are in awe at the selflessness of medical professionals, who believe that NHS workers are heroic and often underpaid by international standards, who reject the insane US mish-mash and yet who believe we need to improve the way we deliver, manage and finance universal healthcare in Britain, for the good of patients, the country and medical staff.

      Yet in the secular, intolerant religion propagated by Labour’s cultish fundamentalists, anything other than unconditional, total adulation of the status quo must be punishable by cancellation. The double-standards are staggering. Patriotism is generally taboo for the Left: they keep telling us how much better Europeans are at everything, from making cars to the generosity of their welfare state. Yet the NHS is the one exception, their own cricket test: to suggest that we could learn from Germany, which has suffered fewer Covid deaths, where 60 per cent of hospitals are private, where citizens choose between a hundred competing insurers, each with different healthcare plans, is to commit an act of heresy. When it comes to healthcare, Labour are nationalistic little Englanders – particularly when the party is struggling in the polls.

      Take the character assassination meted out to Kristian Niemietz of the Institute of Economic Affairs think tank. His rather mild report on how healthcare systems coped with the pandemic concludes that “there is nothing special about the NHS”. It fared worse overall than many, but not all, other countries. He concludes that, when it comes to its performance relative to others, “there is no rational basis for the adulation the NHS is currently receiving, and no reason to be ‘grateful’ for the fact that we have it [rather than a different kind of health system].” This triggered a maelstrom of confected fury: Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner claimed he said “NHS staff don’t deserve our thanks”, a scandalous misrepresentation of what Niemietz actually argued.

      But why are the Tories allowing this madness to continue? They have successfully made the NHS their own again, most spectacularly with Vote Leave’s co-opting of the health service. They ought to be spending some of this capital now: to ensure we don’t implode again come the next pandemic, Tory policy cannot just be about centralisation – including the reversal of previous reforms – and cash.

      Tragically, the party seems not to fully grasp the power of its own history in this area. There is an intriguing black and white portrait hanging on the wall of Matt Hancock’s Whitehall office: it is of Henry Willink, a long-forgotten Tory MP the Conservatives ought, by rights, to be talking a lot more about. As Winston Churchill’s health minister, he is the true inventor of the NHS: it is he, rather than Labour’s Nye Bevan, who should be a household name. Willink’s white paper, a National Health Service, was published in February 1944. That plan was far superior to the version Labour eventually delivered.

      In his Five Giants, Nicholas Timmins recounts how Willink’s plan backed a mixed economy for hospitals: some would be public and others private, though working for the NHS. Crucially, it was “in the most embryonic of forms… an outline of the internal market that the Conservatives finally introduced into the NHS in 1990.”

      In fact, the proposal was even better than that: while municipal hospitals would be taken over by 30 or so boards, “voluntary hospitals” would have been free to contract with them for services. We would have ended up, like in Germany and other nations, with the majority of hospitals privately owned and the NHS the main purchaser; care would still have been free for patients. Willink’s overall vision was imperfect, but it was far less rigid and monolithic than what we ended up with. It would have allowed evolution over time, been far more resilient and open to private sector ideas, money and technologies, and many of today’s problems would not exist. The private-public partnership that did so well with vaccines would have been the norm, rather than an amazing exception.

      Yet Bevan dismissed Willink’s brilliant compromise as “no scheme at all” when he became health secretary. He decreed that all hospitals should be nationalised, an idea occasionally floated since the Thirties but that had never been part of any government or party proposal. This was a socialist putsch by Bevan which, together with a deal he struck with the Royal Colleges, was to lock in a one-size-fits-all system almost no other nation adopted. Willink slammed the hospital nationalisations in the Commons in May 1946, warning that they “will destroy so much in this country that we value” and be a great loss to local communities, to no avail.

      The other great, intolerable lie in British politics, therefore, is that the Tories have never believed in the NHS. They obviously do: they commissioned its original blueprint. But there must be more than one way to be pro-NHS and pro-universal healthcare: it is morally right to reform a system that doesn’t work as well as it could.

      The conspiracy of silence, the bullying, the dissembling: all must end. We need to be able to have an honest conversation on how to improve the NHS. It could be through a Royal Commission; perhaps there could be a referendum. But Covid has shown beyond any possible doubt that change there must be, and that demagogues must no longer be able to halt it.

      https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/02/10/labours-shameful-lies-nhs-silencing-debate-failings/

    6. Allister Heath wrote about the IEA spat yesterday.

      Labour’s shameful lies about the NHS are silencing debate about its failings

      The Tories’ original 1944 plan for a national health service would have served us better in the pandemic

      ALLISTER HEATH

      There is a gigantic, corrosive lie at the heart of British politics, an untruth so great, so debilitating that it all but guarantees that we will remain unprepared for the next calamitous pandemic. This falsehood, propagated principally by Labour but in which the Tories have been complicit out of cowardice, is that any criticism of the NHS’s performance or administrative structure is tantamount to attacking doctors and nurses.

      In this nonsensical, binary world of the Left-wing imagination, you either believe that the NHS is the best possible healthcare system, improvable only by increasing its budget, or you stand accused of hating the very people who have put their lives on the line, working night and day in ICUs, and in vaccination centres. You either worship at the altar of NHS orthodoxy, insisting that it has nothing to learn from any other country, or you are an ungrateful monster, secretly obsessed with importing America’s dystopian healthcare system into Britain.

      There is no space for those of us who are in awe at the selflessness of medical professionals, who believe that NHS workers are heroic and often underpaid by international standards, who reject the insane US mish-mash and yet who believe we need to improve the way we deliver, manage and finance universal healthcare in Britain, for the good of patients, the country and medical staff.

      Yet in the secular, intolerant religion propagated by Labour’s cultish fundamentalists, anything other than unconditional, total adulation of the status quo must be punishable by cancellation. The double-standards are staggering. Patriotism is generally taboo for the Left: they keep telling us how much better Europeans are at everything, from making cars to the generosity of their welfare state. Yet the NHS is the one exception, their own cricket test: to suggest that we could learn from Germany, which has suffered fewer Covid deaths, where 60 per cent of hospitals are private, where citizens choose between a hundred competing insurers, each with different healthcare plans, is to commit an act of heresy. When it comes to healthcare, Labour are nationalistic little Englanders – particularly when the party is struggling in the polls.

      Take the character assassination meted out to Kristian Niemietz of the Institute of Economic Affairs think tank. His rather mild report on how healthcare systems coped with the pandemic concludes that “there is nothing special about the NHS”. It fared worse overall than many, but not all, other countries. He concludes that, when it comes to its performance relative to others, “there is no rational basis for the adulation the NHS is currently receiving, and no reason to be ‘grateful’ for the fact that we have it [rather than a different kind of health system].” This triggered a maelstrom of confected fury: Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner claimed he said “NHS staff don’t deserve our thanks”, a scandalous misrepresentation of what Niemietz actually argued.

      But why are the Tories allowing this madness to continue? They have successfully made the NHS their own again, most spectacularly with Vote Leave’s co-opting of the health service. They ought to be spending some of this capital now: to ensure we don’t implode again come the next pandemic, Tory policy cannot just be about centralisation – including the reversal of previous reforms – and cash.

      Tragically, the party seems not to fully grasp the power of its own history in this area. There is an intriguing black and white portrait hanging on the wall of Matt Hancock’s Whitehall office: it is of Henry Willink, a long-forgotten Tory MP the Conservatives ought, by rights, to be talking a lot more about. As Winston Churchill’s health minister, he is the true inventor of the NHS: it is he, rather than Labour’s Nye Bevan, who should be a household name. Willink’s white paper, a National Health Service, was published in February 1944. That plan was far superior to the version Labour eventually delivered.

      In his Five Giants, Nicholas Timmins recounts how Willink’s plan backed a mixed economy for hospitals: some would be public and others private, though working for the NHS. Crucially, it was “in the most embryonic of forms… an outline of the internal market that the Conservatives finally introduced into the NHS in 1990.”

      In fact, the proposal was even better than that: while municipal hospitals would be taken over by 30 or so boards, “voluntary hospitals” would have been free to contract with them for services. We would have ended up, like in Germany and other nations, with the majority of hospitals privately owned and the NHS the main purchaser; care would still have been free for patients. Willink’s overall vision was imperfect, but it was far less rigid and monolithic than what we ended up with. It would have allowed evolution over time, been far more resilient and open to private sector ideas, money and technologies, and many of today’s problems would not exist. The private-public partnership that did so well with vaccines would have been the norm, rather than an amazing exception.

      Yet Bevan dismissed Willink’s brilliant compromise as “no scheme at all” when he became health secretary. He decreed that all hospitals should be nationalised, an idea occasionally floated since the Thirties but that had never been part of any government or party proposal. This was a socialist putsch by Bevan which, together with a deal he struck with the Royal Colleges, was to lock in a one-size-fits-all system almost no other nation adopted. Willink slammed the hospital nationalisations in the Commons in May 1946, warning that they “will destroy so much in this country that we value” and be a great loss to local communities, to no avail.

      The other great, intolerable lie in British politics, therefore, is that the Tories have never believed in the NHS. They obviously do: they commissioned its original blueprint. But there must be more than one way to be pro-NHS and pro-universal healthcare: it is morally right to reform a system that doesn’t work as well as it could.

      The conspiracy of silence, the bullying, the dissembling: all must end. We need to be able to have an honest conversation on how to improve the NHS. It could be through a Royal Commission; perhaps there could be a referendum. But Covid has shown beyond any possible doubt that change there must be, and that demagogues must no longer be able to halt it.

      https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/02/10/labours-shameful-lies-nhs-silencing-debate-failings/

    1. So this government is going to introduce a special passport to contradict what is set out in real passports,”…to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance…”
      Perhaps they could call it an “Antipassport”?

      1. 329311+ up ticks,
        Afternoon HP,
        Now that dick of ten, squeezer of the pillow whisperer ,
        AKA amnesties R me, and mindful of the Dover campaign why do the foreign paedophile / assorted criminals etc,etc, need a passport
        at all ?

        Currently they are the only ones being granted leave of passage

        All the time the electorate insist on giving power to these same governance types what use is a passport to the indigenous ?

    2. Now we understand the true meaning of, “We have no plans to introduce Vaccine Passports.”

      10 years for lying.

      2. My son is working there at the moment while he does his applications for a course.
        When the last lockdown was announced in December, McDs got a bunch of applications the next day, from which they deduced that a lot of people had just been made redundant.
        On the following day, McDs made half their staff redundant, as they had no seated guests.

        1. I know McDonald’s gets trashed but in normal times i think they are a good employer. They offer career advancement. Get high enough with that and the world is your mollusc.

    3. My second son has a 2.1 in Politics and Philosophy from UEA. He is also studying for an external M.Sc in Computer Technology while he works at his job.

      He had no trouble finding his first job and has been headhunted by a large company who wish to pay him an extremely generous salary.

      1. The world is divided into two sort of people…those who can always find some gainful employment, and those who can’t find a job because we’re in a recession / unemployment is high / insert excuse of choice.

    5. ***gets mini violin out…

      The reason you’re not getting a job Jamie is because you’re not black. Payback for young people supporting leftie causes.

      Oh and try to grow up. Starting with your name.

  59. Nicked,cos oi laffed

    “Odd really….. last year we were queuing up to offer the Windrush
    generation compensation but this year they would have got a 10 year
    stretch for failure to correctly complete the required paperwork

    Only saying….”

    1. If any West Indian or African person gets ten years for lying about where they have been, I will eat my hat. That would be racist….

  61. A rather uncritical pro-Putin article in today’s DT:

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/02/12/russias-sputnik-coronavirus-vaccine-shot-arm-kremlin-needs-right/

    Even though the result of their ‘trials’ have been published in the ‘respected’ Lancet, I should point out that medical and science journals have not exactly been above reproach (IMHO) over the last year, having published and then rescinded a fake critical report about the benefits/safety of hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of COVID and blackballing the peer-reviewed study by Danish academics which (again) proved that the public using facemasks during the pandemic was worthless.

  62. Only wrong at the end, yer Lordship. Hancock shouldn’t be allowed to go anywhere else in government.

    Does Mr Hancock really think a non-disclosed Portugal visit is worse than a sexual offence?

    When policy-makers impose disproportionate sentences, such as up to 10 years in jail, it is usually because the rule is not widely respected

    JONATHAN SUMPTION

    Mr Hancock’s connection with reality, which has been getting looser for some time, has finally snapped. To enforce his hotel quarantine rules and keep out unwelcome mutations of the Covid-19 virus, there are to be sentences of up to ten years in jail for failing to disclose that you have been to a ‘red list’ country.

    Ten years is the maximum sentence for threats to kill, non-fatal poisoning or indecent assault. Does Mr Hancock really think that non-disclosure of a visit to Portugal is worse than the large number of violent firearms offences or sexual offences involving minors, for which the maximum is seven years?

    The hotel quarantine rules are a form of imprisonment in solitary confinement. They are brutal, inhumane and disproportionate. They are economically extremely destructive. They are also of limited value because the virus is already endemic in the UK and spontaneously mutates all the time.

    Unwelcome mutations are just as likely to originate in the UK. The so-called Kent variant probably did. So did several cases of the South African variant. At the moment, we are probably a net exporter of mutant viruses.

    Penal policy seeks to match the sentence to the gravity of the crime. When policy-makers impose savage and disproportionate sentences, it is usually because the rule in question is not widely respected and breaches are hard to detect.

    They reckon that if they can only catch ten per cent of offenders, they need to impose spectacular penalties on them so as to deter the other ninety per cent. This technique is arbitrary and unfair. It also tends to discredit the law.

    There is something wrong with a law that is so little respected and so difficult to enforce that this kind of thing is necessary.

    As with so many of the Government’s Covid-19 measures, the ten-year jail sentence is important mainly for what it tells us about the mentality of the decision-makers. Laws like these can only be justified on the footing that nothing matters except keeping infections down.

    They are the work of people who think that there is no limit to the human misery, oppressive cruelty, economic damage or injustice that we must put up with if it reduces infections.

    Mr Hancock is on record as saying that he will “stop at nothing” to suppress Covid-19. Yet, however admirable their objectives, ministers who will stop at nothing to achieve them are dangerous fanatics. There is always a point at which even the best of objectives is not worth achieving if the cost in terms of human wellbeing is too high.

    This balance is fundamental to intelligent policy-making. The main charge to be levelled at the present government is not that it has got the balance wrong. It is that it is not interested in balance at all. It is not a natural tyrant, but it believes, like every tyrant that ever lived, that the end justifies the means.

    In public policy, this is hardly ever true. There are no absolute principles, but only pros and cons. Ministers who consider only the pros and ignore the cons are unfit to hold office.

    Mr Hancock has spent too long in the same job, working on the same project. Ministers in that position tend to develop a kind of tunnel vision. They get the bit between their teeth. They become incapable of thinking about the broader implications of their actions.

    This probably explains why his reaction to each new revelation that his policies are failing to suppress Covid-19, is to double down on them instead of pausing to think about whether they are really worth the candle.

    A spell in another department which has to cope with the collateral damage, would do him, and us, a power of good. Try Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, or perhaps Culture, Media and Sport.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/02/09/does-mr-hancock-really-think-non-disclosed-portugal-visit-worse/

    1. “There is always a point at which even the best of objectives is not worth achieving if the cost in terms of human wellbeing is too high.”
      We passed that point several months ago.

    2. “A spell in another department which has to cope with the collateral
      damage, would do him, and us, a power of good. Try Business, Energy and
      Industrial Strategy, or perhaps Culture, Media and Sport.”

      I’ve got a much better idea, ten years of enforced unemployment, living only on what he can beg on a street corner, like a homeless veteran, would be more appropriate.

        2. It’s the only way they can survive.
          As parasites.
          Politics and pussy; although looking at him I suspect he’s cuckold material.

      2. Don’t let him anywhere near the DCMS! We have enough problems trying to keep racing going as it is.

    3. Or just get rid of this jumped up tyrant altogether.
      Oops! It was suggesting he jump in the sea that got me suspended from Twitter yesterday.

    4. I rather think that the little Corporal Schickelgruber would “Stop At Nothing” to implement his final solution.

      Do we detect a fanatical similarity?

    5. An excellent article. “Mr Hancock’s connection with reality, which has been getting looser for some time, has finally snapped.” Just what many of us have been thinking and saying – why is HalfCock still in his job?

        1. A coincidence that Hancock, a cheerleader for WEF leaders, was appointed Health Secretary and three months later a pandemic arises that he is able to weaponise against the people of the UK?

    6. Sadly, Hancock is only fanatical about CV-19 as a means to pursue his real goal. To suck up to Herr Schwab & Co by creating the 4th Industrial Revolution within the UK. He reminds me of a particular nasty school ‘creep’ we had at school. Despised by everyone, including the prefects and masters.

  63. Churchill College panel claims wartime PM was a white supremacist leading an empire ‘worse than the Nazis’

    Winston Churchill was a white supremacist leading an empire “worse thanthe Nazis”, according to an academic
    panel at a Cambridge college named in his honour.

    The group chaired by college fellow Prof Priyamvada Gopala, criticised in 2020 for claiming on social media that
    “white lives don’t matter… as white lives”, was branded biased before the event began for omitting defenders of
    the wartime leader..

    Well, I never, here she i working in a College in UK talking English ( out of her backside), taking UKgeld, enjoying a pampered life style.

    If she does not like it here let her indulge in sex and travel to somewhere else

    Cambridge defends academic who said ‘white lives don’t matter’

    Dr Priyamvada Gopal, an expert in postcolonial literature, claimed hertweets were ‘speaking to a structure and
    ideology, not about people’

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/02/11/churchill-white-supremacist-leading-empire-worse-nazis-claims/

      1. I am beginning to think that all white people should leave Africa and much of Asia and that all non-white people should go the places vacated by the whites.

      3. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money.

        1. Those types are twitchy edgy nut jobs , they obtain their so called doctorates by being argumentative and defiant , and I bet they are nasty threatening bullies with huge chips on their shoulders!

    3. Cambridge University is steadily losing its reputation for education.

      Architecturally, as with most post war modern buildings that have defiled Cambridge, Churchill College on Madingley Road is an absolute eyesore. It was built in the late sixties following an architectural competition by the Russell Square London practice of Sheppard Robson.

      Sheppard Robson are still going but moved to Kentish Town and now the sort of corporate practice you associate with the phrase: ‘a safe pair of hands’.

      I believe there might be a link between the college environment created by such rebarbative buildings and the academic fodder they produce. Compare their output with Corpus or Peterhouse and Kings.

      1. I shall be very interested to see what happens with the new Pembroke buildings on the Mill Lane site across the road on the Peterhouse side.

      2. In Woking we’re hoping to have the new monstrosities demolished and the artist impression put up in their place.

        Talk about a bloody eyesore and they want to build another nine it is rumoured.

      3. In Woking we’re hoping to have the new monstrosities demolished and the artist impression put up in their place.

        Talk about a bloody eyesore and they want to build another nine it is rumoured.

      5. I was shocked that in the interests of wokery Jordan Peterson lost his position at Cambridge University.

  64. Just received a birthday present from a Nottler. Never had anything like it. Johnston’s of Elgin. By appointment to the Duke of Rothesay.

    A beautiful cashmere sweater. Must have cost a fortune.

    2. Yo Fizz

      When I was in Singapore, in the mid 1970’s the shops there were selling goods by

      P.ringle (knitwear)
      P,arker (pens)
      Items made in USA (small town in Japan)
      Sieko watches
      etc
      Just saying

      1. Singapore otherwise know as knock off central. I don’t think Prince Charles goes in for that.

        1. I didn’t know Prince Charles was a Nottler – perhaps we’d better mind our language………

    4. Remember to put it in a plastic bag to protect it from moth larvae. We recently had a moth problem which we traced to an Afghan rug we had purchased. We were obliged to wash the rug thoroughly with water and soda.

      Off topic I just received some bottles of Aloe Vera cream and O’Keefe’s Skin Repair cream from Boots. Thank you for the tip as both are very soothing.

      1. I have put everything large and woollen outside in this cold weather to try and kill the little beggars.

        Tidying up my bureau recently, I realised they had been in a lot of old children’s paint brushes left over from when my children were small. They must be hogs hair – I thought they were artificial. Some of the paint brushes had all the bristles eaten away, which may be the source of the last two years’ outbreaks in April/May.

        1. Showing results for does freezing woolens kill moth larvae
          Search instead for does freezing woolens kill mothh larvae

          The best way of killing adults, eggs and larvae is to deep freeze items. Seal them in plastic ‘freezer’ bags at -18°C for at least two weeks. Adult clothes moths can be killed by spray aerosols, but using these to target larvae is more difficult.

          UNDERSTANDING CLOTHES MOTH INFESTATIONS …

          1. Well our garden is much larger than our freezer, and we did get down to -13.5 last night, so I reckon it’s worth a try. The cold weather is supposed to last until at least Monday night.

      2. Thanks for the tip. I have large ziplock bags to protect the good stuff. Plus mothballs in abundance in my wardrobes.

        I’m very glad you find O’keefe’s helpful and brings some relief. Have you considered your laundry detergent? Fabric softeners also can be a nightmare for sensitive skin.

    1. Statistically, she probably hasn’t though.
      And anyway, the cartoonist has made his intentions perfectly clear by adding the McDonalds props. Oh dear, more possibilities for offence…

      1. Talking of making assumptions, how does the woman in the zoomer know the young woman isn’t exempt from wearing masks?

      1. On Saturday, in Morrisons, I followed two vastly overweight men – they were selecting stuff full of fat and sugar at every shelf they stopped by. Indeed, one called after the other to make sure to stock up on (dammit, I forget the name but it was something) sickeningly fattening.

        1. “Nobody got an arse that big eating celery”
          A line from a Jilly Cooper floats into my head. I find that Jilly often provides a pertinent quote!

          1. Ooh crikey bb2! Don’t use chick lit as a pertinent quote! Somebody used JK Rowlings Professor Dumbledore this morning, and got absolutely slated! Personally, I don’t care if a truism comes from the Beano!

          2. I was one of the slaters!
            In a hierarchy of literature, I would place both Jilly and the Beano above JK Rowling for wit and originality, but that’s just my personal preference!

          3. Never read anything by JK Rowling …. although come to think of it, if it’s not original, I may well have done.

          4. It’s a sort of mixture of Enid Blyton, Joan Aiken and the Worst Witch books. At about the third book, she got onto some kind of Messianic quest to educate a generation with her ideas about equality, inclusion and race theory. She carried it through to a logical, but slightly disappointing conclusion where Harry doesn’t kill the villain, but the villain’s curse rebounds back onto him, killing him. Thus Harry remains essentially non-violent (remember kids, violence is always bad!).

          5. My children fortunately attained adulthood before the books came out – so I didn’t have to bother with any of them, or the films.

            I did watch the adaptation of “A Casual Vacancy ” a few years ago as it was filmed round here. It was absolute carp.

            Still – at least JKR is a woman and not a person who could possibly give birth at some time.

          6. A Casual Vacancy was indeed terrible – all her prejudices showed through. I read all the Potter books and did enjoy them although I thought they were derivative – the first one was the best.

          7. I quite enjoyed HP1, 2, 21/2.
            But:
            The big money was kicking in.
            any integrity was lost but
            hey ho… every one is a winner,
            except the sucker consumer!!

          8. I used to find it very odd that adult commuters would be deeply engaged in reading the latest Rowling confection.

          9. I never have enough books to read, so I am not going to turn up my nose at the odd children’s book….

          10. Pity you can’t come round – we have thousands of books.

            Do you mean books for odd children?….{:¬))

          11. I have a couple of thousand here – memory like a goldfish, so there is a high chance that I will re-read the good ones. I get rid of any novels that annoy me with political correctness – which is all recently published ones from the UK.

          12. Sorry bb2! My iPad won’t go back that far today! I had a friend who was an English teacher and she always said it didn’t matter what the children read as long as they had a grounding in words and their use!

          15. Anyone who can get young children to read their way through thousands of pages is instilling a habit that might last a lifetime and their tastes will no doubt change as they mature.

            That has to be a good thing.

          16. JK has salvaged a little bit of respect since she became a consistent feminist and rejected the re-definition of women.

          17. Sue, I remember ‘Jilly’ from
            her ST articles… very ‘Witty’
            …. a now disappeared trait.
            ‘Jilly’ was an acknowledged
            columnist in her day.

          18. Especially if uttered by Dennis the Menace, or Plug or Wilfrid from The Bash Street Kids (pillars of wisdom all).

          23. I eat quite a lot of celery. It is delicious with full-fat blue cheese – such as St Agur – pushed firmly into the groove.

          29. Dear Rastus and Caroline;

            Will you two kindly retire…!

            I think Phizzee might call it
            a ‘sweatie brow moment.’

      2. It must be very difficult to come up with an idea for a cartoon which is both perceptive and inoffensive.

        I often ponder the last three lines of Philip Larkin’s poem:

        It becomes still more difficult to find
        Words at once true and kind,
        Or not untrue and not unkind.

        Talking In Bed

        Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
        Lying together there goes back so far,
        An emblem of two people being honest.
        Yet more and more time passes silently.
        Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest
        Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,
        And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
        None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
        At this unique distance from isolation
        It becomes still more difficult to find
        Words at once true and kind,
        Or not untrue and not unkind.

      3. It must be very difficult to come up with an idea for a cartoon which is both perceptive and inoffensive.

        I often ponder the last three lines of Philip Larkin’s poem:

        It becomes still more difficult to find
        Words at once true and kind,
        Or not untrue and not unkind.

        Talking In Bed

        Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
        Lying together there goes back so far,
        An emblem of two people being honest.
        Yet more and more time passes silently.
        Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest
        Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,
        And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
        None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
        At this unique distance from isolation
        It becomes still more difficult to find
        Words at once true and kind,
        Or not untrue and not unkind.

      4. And, of course, the Land Whale’s Big Macs are part of the irony that the POTs have failed to recognise.

    4. Oh dear, Bob. Why do you waste your precious time arguing with the knobheads who inhabit Twatter?

      You can’t educate pigshit!

  67. Any council tax raises in future MUST go towards the placement & maintenance of stocks in the town square, with rotten throwing material
    council supplied, and councilers / MPs when deserving.

    breitbart,

    ‘I Know Survivors Who Are 70’ – Rotherham MP Reveals Huge Scope of Rape Gang Abuse

    1. That means the abuse would have been happening in the 1960s. A very similar incident is described in the original Call the Midwife books, in London in the 1950s.

  69. OT

    Have any NoTTLers discovered that, during the compulsory house arrest, they have got out of bed later in the morning?

    1. No. The only discernible changes in 2020 were that I saw hardly anything of my dearly beloved (bad), and I did a LOT more painting (good).

    2. We’ve been up earlier this week as we’ve had a painter and decorator in at 8 am each day. Looking forward to tomorrow.

      1. Lucky sod! We have been waiting two years – he promises to come at the end of March to start the inside – then in May to do the outside.

    3. OT

      ‘Have any NoTTLers discovered that, …’

      Are you referring to a particular day or
      every day, if so yes!

    6. I am up at 8ish then I open up the house ,let the dogs out into the garden , take Moh’s coffee upstairs, arrange his pillows and put the TV on for him .
      I come back downstairs, let the dogs into the house , drink my coffee, wind up my lap top and see how many Nottlers are about , whilst still in my jimjams !

        1. Nope, it’s ‘cos Oi works for a living… alarm comes on 05:45 and I whiffle into life to 06:15 when the call from the bladder becomes too much.

    8. I don’t have a set time I would like to wake up (given I’m not working), so I either wake up ‘when I do’ (no alarm set) and don’t feel tired, or when the family in the flat above mine is up and about and makes enough noise (they have a 6 month and a 2 year-old kid) to wake me up. I mostly read the news and watch YouTube videos plus post here for about an hour or so, then get abluted and have some breckie.

      When I was last working (well before the coof started) I was always up at around 6am, out the door by 7.30am the latest.

    9. As I am retired I always get up late (I’m a night owl). In the old days when I had a social life, I used to get up earlier because I had places to go. Now, there doesn’t seem to be much point in getting up at all, except to keep the Rayburn alight.

        1. One I used to have before everything was arbitrarily shut down; going to see friends, meeting up in a pub or cafe for a drink, having lunch out, going to meetings and gatherings, riding the Connemara, dropping in for a coffee and a chat …

          1. :-((
            I seem to recall some activities like that, but fewer in number and less… social.
            Sigh

    10. No, not really. I’m a creature of habit…like my first coffee about 7am and breakfast over and cleared away about an hour + later.

      1. If I’m having breakfast (more than a coffee), I like to take time over it, so typically weekends only as on weekdays I need to be at work 08:00. So, I’m up & making coffe and breakfast for the family, but don’t eat myself.

  71. DT Article – Sherelle Jacobs

    The EU is dead, long live the EU! Whether Brussels has had a hellish or heartening week, it is slightly difficult to tell. On the one hand, Brussels’ vaccine embarrassment is a historic moment. On the other hand, the Commission has been in its element in recent days, as the dud deal it outwitted the Johnson Government into signing continues to unravel.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/02/12/eu-vaccine-implosion-may-finally-trigger-bodys-controlled-disintegration/

    Many of us here from the moment it arrived saw that it was a dud deal.

    The so-called ‘hero of Brexit’, Nigel Farage, has enough egg on his face to make several omelettes with a sponge pudding on the side for judging it a pippin when it was rotten to the core

    The only possible redemption I can see is the hope that this BTL comment from C Watson which expressed the view that Johnson and Gove had a cunning plan all along which was to: Get a deal to keep most people happy, knowing full well that the EU will provide so much evidence of bad faith that the deal can be scrapped.

    Johnson and Gove are hardly cunning negotiators and if something went wrong in their understand of the wording and terms of the dud deal’s translation into English they can hardly be described as cunning linguists either.

      1. Gus (on left) is slightly larger. Today they both went out voluntarily into the snow – and resisted attempts to bring them in!

  73. DT evening headline:

    “Coronavirus latest news: R number drops below 1 for first time since July”

    Best have permanent lockdown – until July 2024

    2. Time to refit HMS Victory – wind power is the way ahead!? Incidentally, this is the NATO Sec Gen “Before coming to NATO, he was the UN Special Envoy on Climate Change from 2013 to 2014“!!

      1. Apparently, some years back, Elfin Safety tried to ban tanks because of the danger to the crew of fuel and high explosives in close proximity….

    5. I hope that this is a tongue in cheek suggestion, exmicturating the current crop of woke green morons.

      Sadly, I suspect he is being serious.

    2. ‘Unfortunately we’ve lost our roar….’

      And our [excuse me, Chums,]
      ….[F*ckin oar. …

      Himself only must be wondering
      WHY?

    1. I would rather not know anymore about Chinese weirdy things.

      The moment we entered the year of the Rat last year I had strange feelings of doom and gloom!

      2. I like pork spare ribs. Sorry Plum.

        And in honour of the impending Great Reset, shouldn’t that order be flied lice?

  80. Cook has just sent the MR upstairs with a glass of wine for me. So I’ll call it a day. Damned cold it was – a bitter easterly wind. Temp never rose above zero. Much the same tomorrow – then Sunday it starts to thaw – followed by “Amber Warnings of Flooding” courtesy the beeboid scare service.

    A demain.

    1. Despite the temperature being about 3 degrees cooler yesterday, the lack of any wind and the with the sun out made it quite ok out. Not today. I went out with two wooly hats on and I still got back with a cold head.

    2. Same sort of weather here, Bill; bitterly cold lazy (it goes through, rather than round) wind and scarcely above freezing.

      1. When I was a young man I worked with a bloke from Suffolk who had been strong and handsome in his youth, so I was told. I knew him when he was nearly 80 and he could still shift a full day, and then some. He had a deep contempt for all things Norfolk: “In Norfolk they say they have a lazy winter wind, because it goes straight through you. I guess we wuz a winter wind, but we wuz never lazy about it”.

        I walked into the village with him once, all the ladies of a certain age (and more) gave him their best smiles.

  81. Completely off topic.

    Spring has arrived here. Hooray.

    The hares are appearing regularly and the cranes are heading east and north; plus the orchids are popping up everywhere.

    Oh happy days.

    1. Some local birds have been braving the cold and lack of available food to bring up some young’uns. Lord knows how they shelter from the freezing cold temperatures in leafless bushes. But I still hear them chipring away wanting food as I pass during my daily walks.

      1. We have a lot of evergreen shrubs and hedges in the garden, some fairly close to the house and they are packed with birds.
        The robins tits and sparrows and the red and black starts are already claiming their territories within the walls and under the eves, particularly over the roundel and the pigeonnier “tower”.
        Even the odd bat is stirring.

        The blackbirds seem to love the bay trees, and they are fiercely defensive.

    2. Spring not scheduled here for at least a month. Be nice if the temperature could rise somewhere near to freezing…

      1. We will almost certainly get a late frost, which will harm many plants.

        One of the reasons I leave the garden as a mess at this time of year, much to HG’s annoyance, is in the hope that decomposing leaves will protect the orchids and the other less hardy plants. There are many celandines popping up in the more sheltered areas around us.

        I was very pleased to see lots of lizards coming out of the walls when there was some warmth in the sun as well as the enormous black bumble bees.

        1. Seems colder, later, than usual, so I expect spring will be delayed here. Less snow, so we may well have low reservoirs in the summer – also, no snow recently means it’s all dry and ready to burn as seen recently close to Fallick Alec’s place. Hope we don’t get forest fires again this year – it’s no fun.

          1. They are frightening.

            A few years ago, the fire brigade, with much help from air-dumping, stopped a small (90 hectare) fire just before it was about to jump the road and hit our trees and château sosraboc.

            It was 1 am, and I took out a case of bottled water to the sapeurs pompier.

            They were extremely grateful and we clearly scored many brownie points because we are still greeted warmly at village functions by the local firemen.

          2. Ooo… too close for comfort! I wonder, do not most ppeople show their appreciation for these things?
            A couple of years ago, we called in several fires caused by lightning close to Firstborn’s farm ( he is a tree-herd), and that was bad enough. His house is surrounded by open field, but even so, the loss of capital in 300 acres of trees would be bad.

          3. I hope people show their appreciation, but I suspect not.

            I was pleasantly surprised, possibly because it was 1 am and they were hot, tired and on the borderline between winning and having another 90+ hectares down the valley to try to deal with, but it was almost like having a booze up in a pub.

  82. There I was last night, contemplating an evening of splendid idleness when the phone rang. When a customer calls you out of hours and they start with “Er …”, you know they are in the shit and trying not to panic. So I worked with one of their guys until 1am when I was able to hand over some hours of handle turning to him and go to bed; from the logs he signed off at 5am – well he’s a lot younger than me. I was up at 6am and got their key systems up and running at 8:56am, 4 minutes to spare, no worries. I rang their MD, “That’s why I called you in Rodger, you always leave a margin of safety in the back of your trousers. There’s techies and there’s engineers”. A nice compliment, and I should think so too, considering.

    It is now all tickety boo, and I have found a very presentable bottle of Amaro at the back of the cupboard with which to start proceedings.

      1. Technical crises have always been my forte. It’s a strange art, planning a course through unknowns, paying close attention to “what we know, what we think we know, and what may kill us”. Doesn’t happen very often, and every time it’s a Cup Final – now I have to perform, I have to do what I do, and show that I can do it. Failure will be in the spotlight.

        Actually I thoroughly enjoy it. I later discovered that their guy emailed the MD at 5am “We’re fucked” basically, but sellotape and string held it all up for a day until it could be made solid after hours. Woof.

      1. Which just happen to be the places where the sacred and infallible NHS shipped patients out to?

    2. As I have daringly suggested throughout this pandemic .

      I know people who have been admitted to hospital for many other reasons and have caught Covid .

      My suspicions are cleaning staff , nurses who go off duty in their uniforms , doctors and staff from ethnic backgrounds and a whole strange casual attitude to cleanliness .. sharing pens / keyboards / phones / cupboard doors etc etc.

      The other frightening thing is when patients are intubated .. and how experienced are the doctors who do it , piercing vital tubes whilst on route to the airways ..

      1. I seem to recall that hospital cleaners and porters were hit heavily by COVID. Perhaps they were one of the transmission mechanisms? Just a thought.

    2. We nearly had a man overboard -our N.Ireland Rep, but I think he’s elected to stay so we can have “There was an Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman jokes…” (For which he gets full marks and two for neatness…)

      1. Grizz & I caan do the Swede and Norwegian version of those jokes.
        (Hint: Swedes are the Irish character)

    3. We nearly had a man overboard -our N.Ireland Rep, but I think he’s elected to stay so we can have “There was an Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman jokes…” (For which he gets full marks and two for neatness…)

  87. Evening, all. Given the amount of hospital acquired infections, worrying ignorance appears to be endemic.

    1. UK hospitals are well known to be insanitary.
      If you have been in a UK hospital recently and enter a Norwegian one, you have to declare it and be quarantined – MRSA is the big fear.

      1. Hospitals today are nothing like the one I spent my time in during the fifties. Then the overwhelming smell was of disinfectant. Also, the wards were light, high-ceilinged and airy.

          2. Agreed. It was under T Blair’s watch that each hospital bedside should have its own (pay as you go) TV . How the fuck are you supposed to clean them when deep cleaning a ward to contain the spread of MRSA or NovoVirus?

          4. Agreed. But I guess the NHS signed a 20 year deal so they won’t be removed any time soon….

          6. I wasn’t referring to repurposed conference centres but the original Nightingale ward principles….

      3. A hospital in Southampton did a long deep clean, and totally eradicated MRSA from the place. They went back to normal and within 10 days they were as before. The problem is that MRSA is endemic in the outside world and visitors bring it in where it infects the vulnerable. To stop it you have to supply chairs that only visitors sit in, are stacked away afterwards, absolutely no visitors sitting on the bed, a very regimented environment. Try enforcing that with British Hoi Polloi – you couldn’t.

        OTOH, patients in separate rooms would help enormously.

  90. -18C outside, really creaky snow, and the most beautiful, starry sky – on a black background. Wonderful, enough to make one believe there might be a God, after all!

    2. Really creaky snow is indicative of the type of snow you get in avalanches, so I am reliably informed by fluid dynamicists at the University of Cambridge. Having said that, I love creaky snow, we used to get it in Yorkshire when I lived there when I was nobbut a girl; all we get in s.Cambs is a sprinkling of icing sugar if we are lucky.

      1. Nowadays, fluid dynamicists at the University of Cambridge think that snow should be black, otherwise it’s racist.

          2. Been underground near there. Mossdale Caverns. They closed the cave system down because of the deaths in 1967 but it has been unofficially reopened. An interesting but dangerous place.

          4. Thanks Belle! Yes, I’ve had a quick look but will read properly when I’m off the phone and back on the laptop.

          5. I have a lump of galena (lead ore) on my windowsill in France. I got it from Greenhow Quarry where I once worked.

          7. No, it was never pointed out to me. I know that I could see York Minster from Skipton Moor on a clear day – nearly 40 miles in a straight line. What is the Yorke’s Folly? – I looked it up and it is down in the valley near Bewerley. I must have passed it a time or two. Probably thought it was some old mine chimneys. My office was in the quarry, high up but couldn’t see beyond the quarry walls.

          10. Thank you Ped! My grandfather ran the Crown Hotel. He’d been a game keeper and the Crown doubled as a shooting lodge in his day, for the syndicate who owned the local estate.

    3. Hmmm, Paul, I was told, while working in Sweden, that snow stops crunching when the temperature drops below -5ºC. I have yet to hear ‘creaky’ snow although, walking from the taxi to security, one evening when it was -20ºC and my moustache froze in the 20 yards it took, it was reported to be -54ºC up north. That does not/can not compute in my poor English brain/

    3. He was probably taken to the Mayday Hospital, and thence to its Mortuary, affectionately known as St Peter’s Gate. No doubt a PM would be performed and the Coroner informed of the findings. Was he born and educated in the UK? Are his parents now in mourning? Did he have potential skills that may have positive benefits for others? Or was his just another young life wasted like so many thousands of others?

      1. Bright lad with a cheeky grin, always keen to meet new friends, kind to animals, helped old ladies to cross the street and loved his Nan to bits. He was only in Croydon to study for a marketing diploma in the pharmaceuticals business. Such a shame.

        Still, onward and upward ….. it’s what he would have wanted.

      2. The loss of a young life, a life hardly lived at all, is a great sadness. He barely got started.

        1. ‘Evening, Walter, “White lives don’t matter much to them either at all.”

          This is probably a more accurate view of their attitude.

  92. Who said Diane Abbott was not made out to be a mathematician?

    The Oregon Department of Education (ODE) recently encouraged teachers to register for training that encourages “ethnomathematics” and argues, among other things, that White supremacy manifests itself in the focus on finding the right answer. An ODE newsletter sent last week advertises a Feb. 21 “Pathway to Math Equity Micro-Course,” which is designed for middle school teachers to make use of a toolkit for “dismantling racism in mathematics.” The event website identifies the event as a partnership between California’s San Mateo County Office of Education, The Education Trust-West and others. Part of the toolkit includes a list of ways “white supremacy culture” allegedly “infiltrates math classrooms.” Those include “the focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer,” students being “required to ‘show their work,’” and other alleged manifestations.

    3. White supremacy focuses on being on time, too. Hence the expression “two o’clock – African time”.

      2. He hasn’t explained it and keeps saying that the vaccine rollout is on track.

        We think that he is short on truth – as always.

    5. Is that why the Zulus never built bridges, tower blocks, developed penicillin or cars?
      They just didn’t want to get their sums white?
      p.s. other African tribes are available.

    6. Perhaps that’s why they haven’t been known for developing aeroplanes, rockets… wheels…

  93. Dick backs Dick….
    No 10 says the PM backs Cressida Dick after Priti Patel suggests “questions” remain over a police sex abuse inquiry.

    2. Just had a thought. When Cressida Dick finally retires from the police and inevitably takes her place among the ermined horde in in the HoL, will she be known as Lady Dick?

      Might be problematic. I’m sure that someone from somewhere on the LBGTQUERTY spectrum or even a TERF will take offence at the title.

      1. I understand one can be a Deaconess these days so a Lady Dickeness shouldn’t be a problem should it?

    3. You mean like in football, with the Board offering unanimous support to the manager, 2 days before they sack him?

    1. When you’re running the engine, best if you can to let it get properly warm. Drives off condensation and shifts muck into the oil filters. A five minute rattle does more damage than it prevents. Remember to check your fuel filters for sludges, too. Things (think “swamp creature”) grow in uncirculated diesel, and that’s not fun to clean.

      1. Thanks. I change the Oil and fuel filters every 350 hour or 12 months which ever comes sooner. And am familiar with the term Diesel Bug. I also try to keep the tank full to the brim during winter months to limit condensation.

          1. No Worries – I was a complete tyro when I started 7 years ago…so am always keen to learn

  95. Just been out to leave a note for the milkman and it’s just a tad above -6°C at the moment!!

    Tomorrow the DT is off to Bursledon for the next 10 days for her mother’s funeral and help her sister start clearing the house out so it’ll be just me & the S@H at home.

      1. I think she & her sister are as much relieved and thankful their Mum is at rest as they are sad at losing her.
        To be honest, she’d been gone with vascular dementia for the past few years anyway.

        1. A blessed relief, particularly as it can go on for years. The quickest demise is to put one’s rel in a care home, I believe.

    2. My app tells me that currently (23:21) the temperature is -2ºC but will fall to -5ºC by 08:00 tomorrow morning. I think I need to go to bed and cuddle up to some warmth.

    1. Dildo Hodges. You have to have some sympathy – look at his parents. Must give him his due though. He set out to be a complete tw@ and he achieved it His mother will be proud.

    2. I sat through the whole debate and have responded BTL, as follows:

      Anglo-Swedish
      1 minute ago
      Dan Hodges, Cited 2020 as the worst year for deaths since 1940/41. In fact it was the 35th year for deaths since then.

      I am surprised that no reference was made to deaths from influenza – zero in 2020/21 winter. Sorry, that’s just BS – they’ve all been attributed to Covid in order to bolster the current Project Fear!

    2. Wake up, Boris, you’re being shafted both at home and away.

      But, then, those outside the ring see all the action.

      1. Perhaps we should throw in the towel as planned.

        Boris is shameless otherwise he would have resigned by now and taken his rotten cabinet with him. They are a disaster for the UK and it gets worse by the hour.

    1. Trouble is, Stephen, Diogenes lived in a barrel, the wankock and co, have us over a barrel and I ain’t too sure that my ‘arris is fire-proof.

          5. There is a small cemetery called Trafalgar Cemetery in Gib. Most of those who were killed during the battle were buried at sea. HMS Victory was towed into Rosia Bay on 28 October 1805. Later, Nelson’s remains were transported to England. Only two who died in the battle are buried there. I once re-painted some nearby guns because I was bored and had nothing to do. They were looking tatty anyway.
            I’m certain the spirit was changed there.

          6. It’s said that the officer that oversaw the barrel being filled, gave strict orders to his crew that the brandy should first be passed through their kidneys.

          7. I think the ‘pickling spirit’ was changed at Gibraltar and it is rumoured that it was syphoned off and drunk by the matelots.

        1. More like, as Duncan said earlier, the death of Clarence in a butt of Malmsey. No one records that he got out a couple of times for a pee.

    1. “Covid-like” ? – -presumably then we’ll see flu deaths rise as covid deaths fall? ( The opposite of the last 12 months ) And the country will have been trashed for nothing?

      3. It’s a scamdemic. This was obvious from the start. It was much the same back in 2009 when we were all supposed to succumb to Swine-Flu.

        As then, millions of pounds of public money was thrown at Pharma companies for vaccines which were never fully deployed and thrown away. For those taking them, many serious adverse reactions occurred, especially among front line health workers.

        The present vaccine from Astra Zeneca is a derivative of their failed and dangerous Swine-Flu confection. It will likely cause more adverse effects if deployed widely.

        This crisis was never about public health but a carefully constructed means to engender fear in the mindset of the populace to make people submit to vaccinations. The ultimate global agenda is to use the invention of climate change to rip us off and render us poorer. Many will die and the few at the top of the wealth pyramid will become ever richer.

        1. Having had covid-19 and having seen half a dozen people die from it I can assure you that this pandemic is actually real. I’m sure your local hospital will let you volunteer then you can see for yourself.

          AstraZeneca’s Swine Flu vaccine was a nasal spray, the covid-19 vaccine is an intramuscular injection. They are totally different and not derivatives. Millions have had the AZ vaccine already. No serious side-effects are apparent yet.

          You’re still suffering from an advanced form of Pollyitis. There are easier ways for the government to make everyone poor than a plandemic. We have always submitted to vaccinations. We are one of the most vaccinated nations on Earth. We have in excess of 90% of people vaccinated against all common childhood illnesses.

          1. Have it your own way as ever. I make it a general rule not to engage with people as offensive as you.

            Edit: Pandemrix, marketed by Glaxo Smith Kline, was an intramuscular injection and led to narcolepsy in many receiving it. Astra Zeneca successfully marketed a similar intramuscular vaccine which made the company millions from public funds before it was flushed down the toilet.

          2. Come on, Thayaric is not offensive, he’s just very sure he’s right, typical INTJ software developer personality. (like me).

          3. Yet they still die FROM Covid, rather than WITH it.

            Have you succumbed to the vaccine programme?

            Are you happy that it’s safe, despite the immunity given to Big Pharma?

            Are you prepared to live with unknown long-term effects, as happened with Thalidomide?

            I await your answers.

          4. Flu is real too, but we don’t shut down the country for it.

            For each vaccination, the logical question is “are my chances of adverse effects greater if I take the vaccine or if I don’t?”
            There’s no magical rule that anything must be good because it’s injected into your arm.
            For the coronavirus, it is well known now that there are several cheap and easily available treatments which, if taken, would prevent almost every death, even among high risk groups.
            Therefore, if these treatments are allowed to be prescribed and given, there is no need to take the risk of having the vaccine.

    3. They are wonderful, so evocative of a bygone era that wasn’t all that long ago. Parts of Leeds were very much like that at that time.

    4. History? I was defending Europe against the threatening Russian hordes then. Patrolling the minefields dividing East and West Germany, amongst other things – and visiting the occasional German bar perhaps.

      2. #MeToo, Ped, on 72 hour lockdown on 85 Squadron, Royal Air Force West Raynham, during the Cuba Crisis, October 1962.

        Then in RAF Germany 1967-69 on 31 Squadron, a Canberra PR Squadron and, with time on Station Flight with incoming Canberras, bristling with aerials and the top of the Pilot’s canopy blanked out, aircraft we could not touch, because they patrolled up and down the German East/West border, listening, listening. listening.

        That’s the way things were in those days. The current ‘Woke’ have no idea what we have saved them from.

    7. “Between 1955 and 1975, around 1.3 million homes were demolished.”

      They turned the streets on their ends, and called it paradise…

      1. That really shocked me so much … and the poor things would have lost their tight friendly neighbour hoods , and streets for the children to play in exchange for ghastly high rise flats .

        2. There is nothing so terrifying as authorities who think they have identified Utopia and intend to inflict it upon their citizens.

    8. That was then, Mags, this is now. No joy, no freedom, just kow-tow to Project Fear..

      When, in Christ’s name, will we rise up against this tyranny?

  105. https://twitter.com/Independent/status/1360378583101939715

    Migrants are being housed at the four-star Crowne Plaza hotel, near Heathrow Airport on outskirts of London
    One 20-year-old boasted how he and 400 other migrants have had the coronavirus jab
    The Daily Mail talked to ten other migrants from Sudan and Eritrea who also took part in ‘mass vaccination’
    Crowne Plaza is among hotels across Britain housing migrants who have slipped into country illegally
    The three star Ibis Styles Heathrow East hotel is where arrivals will stay for compulsory ten nights of isolation
    Unlike migrants, they will have to pay £1,750 for stay, even though usual price would be £600 for ten nights
    By SUE REID and DANIEL MARTIN FOR THE DAILY MAIL

    1. Is it just me but I am sick and tired of seeing those government warning platitudes mounted on their lecterns.

      I would prefer GO OUT: FUCK THE NHS: SAVE YOUR OWN LIFE.

      No other fucker cares about you, especially the politicians you foolishly elected.

    2. More platitudinous claptrap from the Priti Awful Patel, who, I thought at one time, might rid us of the contentious gimmegrunts.

      1. As the old rhyme goes:

        I love the girls who say they will
        And those who say they won’t
        I hate the girls who say they will and then you find they don’t.

        (Priti Patel)

        The last two lines are not applicable here but here they are anyway:

        But of all the girls that I may meet please give give me every night
        A girl who says she never will – who looks as if she might!

  107. Good night, Gentlefolk, let us all reconvene in the morning and discuss the day’s events in our normal, polite but sometimes contentious ways.

    Bill, always says, “A demain’ his language of choice, I will just say, “Bis morgen fruh, mein liebchen”

    Perhaps Peddy is required to correct my plat Deutsch?

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