Friday 15 April: The difference between refugees from Ukraine and Channel migrants

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 we prefer 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.

779 thoughts on “Friday 15 April: The difference between refugees from Ukraine and Channel migrants”

      1. ‘Morning Elsie. Is there such a thing as happy shopping? Thank goodness Mrs HJ replenishes Janus Towers at regular intervals…left to me we would probably starve, such is my dislike of the activity. I suspect that my ‘mental health’ has been damaged in some way and expensive therapy is the only solution!

        1. I can shop for brewing ingredients, skis, guns like a pro, but groceries… 😬

        2. Good morning HJ, and all.
          A number of expensive therapies are available. The Perrier-Jouet therapy, the Petrus therapy, the Yquem therapy, followed by the Delamain therapy or the Macallan therapy. If approached in that order with care and thought, they are effective restoratives for mind sndbody.

    2. Morning Minty. Didn’t Vlad say something similar in Russian – loosely translated as ‘Morning Everyone. Off to Donbassrose!’?

  4. Bonjour.
    So, Ginge and Cringe deigned to drop in on Brenda en route to The Hague.

    Duke and Duchess of Sussex visit the Queen on first trip to UK in two years

    The article goes on to say “It is not known whether they flew by private jet or commercial.” I think it’s fair to say that if we don’t know………it was private.

    1. Does this mean Queen Liz is more indisposed – or ill -than is publicly acknowledged?
      *
      Good Friday Morning…

  5. ‘Morning, Peeps.

    Lots of letters condemning the government’s Rwanda plan, but none of them offering any kind of solution. A bit like Sir Kneel on the news yesterday. Was I alone in shouting at the telly, “Well, what’s your solution then, smart arse?”

    SIR – As Mr Putin is trying to seize the Donbas region of Ukraine, rich in coal and fossil fuels, would it not make sense for Extinction Rebellion activists to superglue themselves to the Russian tanks and military hardware now in that region, rather than disrupting the lives of hard-working British people? Or is this asking too much of our cosy, largely middle-class protesters, who prefer causing transport congestion in already environmentally aware Britain, to helping the heroes of Ukraine?

    Dr Allan Chapman
    Oxford

    Too right, Dr C. I would even stump up a contribution to their travel costs – but only if it’s a one-way ticket. I’m sure Putin and his thugs would prevent any return journey!

    1. If it’s good enough for BTLer Selves then it’s good enough for me:

      Martin Selves
      3 HRS AGO
      At £125 million a year, the Rwanda deal is a steal, yet WOKE says it is too expensive. Nigel Farage, a politician I hugely respect says it has some merit, but prefers to send them back to France. The EU Human Rights Law we are still signed up to will stop this, and if it doesn’t Macron will.
      Rwanda has a very good chance to stop these illegal immigrants. The word is out already. Why would they pay £5000 and end up in Rwanda with no return ticket? I suggest if this Plan starts running, and the Navy are able to “capture”most of the rubber boats, this nasty Industry, supported by Macron with his blind eye, will end abruptly, and will only start again if the ECJ order us to stop the Rwanda solution.
      In short, for once, Farage imho is wrong. This will work if Boris makes it work with determination and speed. His future as PM might depend on it, because his Brexit promises have not been kept, and taking back control of our borders has been the biggest tragedy, with NI close behind.

      1. My betting is on an injunction or similar being given to prevent any deportations until the issue has passed right the way through all possible courts.
        It will take years.
        And then the Rwanda solution will be thrown out.

        1. The only way it would work would be if it were to start immediately, with migrants being sent to Rwanda in the next few weeks. It would then act as a deterrent to would-be migrants and put the people smugglers out of business. But, as you say, this scheme will have every conceivable block put in its way, so it will never happen.

          My guess is that Boris has decided that he must be shown to be doing something, and that it will be other people’s fault that the scheme was not allowed to be implemented.

          1. Unfortunately I fear that his attempt as being seen to be ‘doing something’ will be as spectacularly unsuccessful as all the previous attempts.

        2. Morning Sos. It just needs to get Boris and the Government past the election!

      2. Who cares about the ECJ? Let us do as we please. Let us run thr UK for the British. Let us make British passports nearly impossible to acquire unless both grandparents were UK citizens.

        2. We would need patriotic ministers with strong leadership skills…

          We are doomed.

      3. “This will work if Boris makes it work with determination and speed.” Aye, there’s the rub.

    2. I’m sure anyone gluing themselves to Russian tanks would end up in a labour camp in Vladibostik.

        1. Who needz help wiv there spolling? Turned mine off a long time ago (you had probably guessed that.)

  6. “How to find the best schools in an affordable area”

    What’s with the humongous sub headings in this article?

  7. SIR – That Lord Wolfson of Tredegar resigns as Justice Minister because he cannot accept the unequivocal excuses of Boris Johnson is commendable.

    Will he now show equal strength of character by handing back the peerage he was awarded by Mr Johnson in order to hold that appointment ?

    His Honour Barrington Black
    London NW3

    Pigs will be taking off in their thousands before he leaves the HoL trough…

  8. Good Morning and a Happy Easter to all.
    Beautifully bright & sunny today with an almost mild 3°C outside!

  10. Can anyone here do the ‘diabolical’ sudokus?

    For that matter, why are sudokus given a rating? No other puzzles are. I’d be happier on days that I can’t finish the crossword if I knew it was particularly difficult that day.

    1. When I was doing the puzzles regularly, I generally succeeded. I don’t do them any longer, so they may be more difficult now.

      I think the grading is down to letting the puzzler know it’s likely to take a long time AND you’ll need a pencil and a large eraser as opposed to starting with a pen!

        1. I suspect that regular puzzlers recognise a compiler’s style.
          I used to do the Times and the Telegraph ones when commuting and usually finished them. I tried some when I was last in the UK and failed miserably, lack of practice I guess.
          I used to find some days, often Thursdays, more difficult than others and ones that I found easy other people found difficult and vice-versa. I have never found a diabolical sudoku anything other than very difficult and sudoku gradings to be generally accurate as to difficulty.

          2. I did not think my late father was all that smart (he wasn’t rich). He could complete the Scotsman crossword in around 20 minutes. I with my immense, off the scale intelligence, and a vocabulary a lexicographer would sell his soul for, could usually manage half a dozen clues in an hour tor two…

          3. My maternal grandfather probably never read an entire book in his life; he was an absolute hot shot chess player.

          4. When I was doing them daily they generally took between 20 and 45 minutes. The last one I tried I didn’t even get half way and I even struggled a bit with the Quick.

          11. My dear grandmother completed the DT crossword every day without fail, and always made it look easy. After she died in hospital (bowel cancer) we had the usual horrible task of clearing out her home. On the settee was her last DT crossword, only partially completed, interrupted by the arrival of her lift to the hospital. The memory of that, even 45 years later, remains as poignant as it was then.

          12. That is a very poignant detail.
            I can remember collecting my father from his house to take him to the hospital. Neither of us said anything, but we both knew it would be the last time he would ever see his home. He insisted on polishing his shoes.
            (Oh, heck. Thank goodness I’m not wearing mascara.)

          18. You are playing mind games with the compiler. When I remember the following day to look at the solution, my normal reaction is to call myself a numpty; but there are times when I still cannot see how the answer arrived or the clue seems too convoluted to work out neatly.

        2. They tend to give us clues for “heads down” and “heads across” but I’ve never seen any “heads up” for crosswords. Unless the answer is palindromic. Lol.

    2. I can just about do the diabolical ones but I have to take notes which makes it tedious. The hard ones I can do in my head and I keep a clipboard charged with hard sudokus in the loo.

      A boy with whom I was at school is a professional crossword puzzle setter. His name is Don and he goes under a range of pseudonyms such as: Quixote, Bradman, Duck, Giovani etc. I don’t know if he ever uses Trump.

      1. I have sudoku on my smartphone. Sevral levels of dificulty, and a competition every week. I don’t win.

        1. Morning FA.

          Such strange post Covid after effects .

          Still no taste and smell.. a metallic sensation in my mouth , sinus pain and a cough and my voice is quite husky , cannot chatter for very long !

          A shopping expedition is very tiring , and just driving 12 miles to Dorchester or Weymouth demands a hell of a lot of concentration.. So different to how I felt a few months ago , took everything in my stride .. Dare I blame Covid or getting older ?

          1. Post-viral stuff. After I had glandular fever – at the ripe old age of forty – there were days for a good two years afterwards, when I would wake up and realise I had to re-arrange my plans for that day. In short: what did I NEED to do, rather than what I WANTED to do.
            On the plus side, while that continued, I didn’t develop a cold.

      2. I just see figures and a mental curtain descends.
        Danish D-in-L tells me it’s about patterns, but my brain is unconvinced.

        1. She’s right. Could be shapes, colours, whatever.
          The bigger ones use letters as well.

          1. Colours and letters – I’m fine.
            It’s just that as soon as I see numbers, a mental curtain descends, rather like the fire curtain in London theatres.
            The only exception is dates because I love history.

          2. I failed history (O Level and then A Level which I was forced to take) simply because I could never get the dates right. It was a case of all the right numbers, but not necessarily in the right order, Mr Preview!

    4. Thursday is the absolute corker. The one time I finished it (and I still don’t know how) I was in a state of shock for days.

    5. Sometimes I can, sometimes not, but I always try them. Don’t do crosswords very often and consequently find them a bit hard. I’m pretty sure you can get into the mindset of the compiler if you do them regularly.

    6. I can’t do even the simplest of sudoku. Anything with numbers is completely beyond me 🙁

    1. Oh Gawd! There is a lunatic American woman on the DT trying to say he doesn’t have dementia!! 😱

      1. You can only be suffering from dementia if you have a brain. Where is Spitting Image when we need them?

        1. Yes, I too have memories of ‘The Presidents brain is missing’. The sketches were discontinued after a few weeks didn’t because, it was said, the Yanks found them somewhat offensive. Surely that was the whole point of Spitting Image…

          1. I’m not sure that Spitting Image would have run those sketches if the POTUS at the time had been a Democrat.

    3. Whatever his politics and his history, this is now upsetting. An old man who is seriously old. This has gone beyond Brezhnev being wheeled out; at least the Russians didn’t pretend their man was in charge.

      1. This is pathetic. The Democrats are guilty of senile abuse in putting him in the White House.

        1. May they rot in Hell; both on a personal level for Biden himself, and for the effect on a whole country.

      2. What is disturbing are the efforts made to ensure Biden’s election.
        Even if you discount the vote fraud allegations that have never really been examined, the Democrats & their allies in the US Press and the Soshul Meejah have a lot to answer for.

        1. And they must have known; particularly the inner circle who manipulated this entire situation.
          They saw him daily and amongst their number would have those who noticed his mental decline.

          1. It was bloody obvious before the election that he was having serious problems.

  13. Another fine soldier departs:

    Lieutenant Colonel Peter Blaker, Green Jacket helicopter pilot in Borneo – obituary

    Reliably eccentric, he kept a python in his room, and he was later a mentor to the OTC at Cambridge University

    ByTelegraph Obituaries14 April 2022 • 1:26pm

    Lieutenant Colonel Peter Blaker, who has died aged 85, was a cerebral and eccentric Green Jacket combat helicopter pilot during the Konfrontasi in Borneo; he was later a valued mentor as commanding officer of the Cambridge University Officers Training Corps in the early 1980s, as women began to arrive in larger numbers.

    Guy Peter Blaker was born in London on November 10 1936. His father, Guy Blaker, was a solicitor, while his grandfather had been president of the Law Society. His mother Dawn, née Watson, was the scion of a distinguished military family. His maternal great-grandfather, General Sir John Watson, and his great-uncle, Colonel Conwyn Mansel-Jones, were both awarded the Victoria Cross.

    Peter was an Exhibitioner at Lancing College, then in 1956 was called up to the West Yorkshire Regiment for National Service, before reading Law (though not much of it) at Jesus College, Cambridge; he then joined the Army – he had continued serving in the Territorials, in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, during his studies – and only completed his LLB three decades later.

    Blaker joined the 1st Green Jackets (43rd and 52nd), of which the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry was part, and in April 1962 sailed with the battalion to Malaya, where he commanded Support Weapons Platoon B Company.

    Having seen action that included a successful dawn raid on a rebel-held village, he returned to Britain, becoming one of the earliest officers in the Green Jackets to qualify as a helicopter pilot, then went back to Malaya. His soldiers reported that he would always descend first into a “hot LZ” (landing zone) to check for booby traps or enemy fire.

    He was thought to be the only serviceman to have completed five tours in Borneo, four with the Green Jackets and one with the Army Air Corps helicopters.

    From an early age Blaker assumed a P G Wodehouse persona, complete with stiff collar and monocle. He attributed this to being an only child, which meant he had to provide his own entertainment. Reliably eccentric, in Borneo he kept a python in his room – and wondered why the mess staff would not go in to tidy up. His singular way of doing things could sometimes be alarming, as when he wore his unprotected white helicopter pilot helmet while standing atop reconnaissance vehicles under fire in Cyprus.

    In 1964 he undertook a solo car journey back to Britain in a Morris Mini-Traveller. The car, bought in Penang, took him from Madras to Kandahar in Afghanistan – where he saw a sign saying “London 5,671 miles” – then back home, reaching London in six weeks.

    After continued service with the Green Jackets, in locations including Belfast, Cyprus and West Germany, from 1979 until 1982 he was Commanding Officer OTC at Cambridge University. It was his own career highlight; he was a transformational figure, promoting women as officers on merit, many of them going on to distinguished careers in public service and commerce.

    He was a tireless supporter of his college rowers, including the Jesus Womens’ Boat Club, which became a powerful force on the river for decades after.

    After his last military service, at Nato HQ in Brussels, he became a Queen’s Messenger, and then registrar of the Register of Osteopaths, where he helped to usher into law the Osteopaths Act of 1993, which established the General Osteopathic Council.

    He was ahead of his peers in openly sharing his own challenges with mental health, becoming a counsellor to his alumnae with similar issues at universities, sports, and in public service.

    He had a lifelong passion for India and its people and he became a loyal visitor to his great-grandfather’s last regiment, the Central India Horse.

    After retirement, he was a tireless host at his home outside Henley-on-Thames, and would put up Jesus College rowers during Regatta week. His small rowboat became noted for its ferrying of youthful revellers across racing lanes between the Phyllis Court and Leander clubs, not necessarily with the full approval of the Regatta authorities.

    He began keeping snakes again, though downgrading to North American corn snakes.

    Blaker was a committed Christian, describing himself as an Anglican at home and a Roman Catholic abroad. He retained his military links, being chairman, president and latterly patron of the Henley-on-Thames branch of the Royal British Legion.

    He was married for 53 years to Hiltegund, née Bastian, whose German father had died in a Russian prisoner of war camp. She survives him with their daughter and two sons.

    Peter Blaker, born November 10 1936, died February 2 2022

    PS I believe that he was in the ROYAL Green Jackets…

    2. Indeed. The Royal Green Jackets was formed in 1966.

      (I was in 5(v)Bn RGJ and OUOTC before that – we could have been twins)

  14. Good morning, all. A bit below par again. Damn it. I’ll only look in. Play nicely

        1. Not at all.
          The mere thought of them refusing his kind invitation will buck him up enormously.

    2. Im sorry to hear that, Bilty. Spend the day curled up with G&P – very therapeutic

    3. Curl up and chill. Chow down on Hot X buns and chocky eggs. Ignore pleading looks from G&P.

    2. The defending solicitor, Gerry McGovern, told Judge Sandra Murphy there would be no application for bail and asked for Palani to be closely watched in case he attempted to kill himself.

      Sod that, give him a rope.

  16. 351996+ up ticks,

    Morning Each,
    Lest we forget it is GOOD FRIDAY
    seemingly not to be observed via the media as it could very well offend.

    Friday 15 April: The difference between refugees from Ukraine and Channel migrants

    Not a charitable thought but as units to be fed /clothed / housed after passing through
    country’s with a freedom status are we, as a nation, clasping an asp to the breast ?

    Courtesy of the lab/lib/con mass uncontrolled immigration / paedophile umbrella politico’s / supports / members / voters these Isles have illegals coming out it’s overflow, innocents raped & abused infrastructure broken in many places, the rest to follow.

    Requisitioned property has happen before
    in times of war, mandatory snatching of spare rooms / property’s will come as no surprise to me.

    By the by,
    Dt,
    The tory’s (ino) are set to lose 800 seats with ( a future very afraid issue ) starmer on course to be PM in 2024.

    1. The prat Olly Bell on the racing programme referred to it as “Easter Friday”. Clueless (and woke).

    1. Why haven’t these houses already been used to alleviate the current housing shortage?

      1. Kevin Hollinrake, Tory MP for Thirsk and Malton, has flagged concerns constituents have shared regarding the move. He is in discussions with the government about how to minimise “disturbance” to the approximate 1,000 residents in the village, Yorkshire Live says.

        The new facility will house both migrants who arrive in the UK on boats, and Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war with Russia.

      2. Because the country is run by politicians.

        The time is ripe for a return to leadership by tribal elders. There would have been no trouble with illegal immigrants if that were still the case.

      3. Make a wild guess.
        Top Mark Tips: Write on one side of the paper and include words like ‘colonialist’, ‘white’ ‘privilege’ and ‘Christian’. For the full set, pepper the page with ‘male’ and ‘men’.

    2. These homes should be available for ex-servicemen who find themselves homeless not for economic scroungers

    3. How weird – I was stationed here from October 1964 to September 1967 – In fact I was first married while stationed here in January 1965.

        1. While I was there, we had a Chipmunk Squadron for training Navy helicopter pilots. Church Fenton was a satellite station.

    4. Not far from where i lived as child and beyond Mill Hill there was a substantial sized army Barracks named Inglis Barracks, one of my friends lived there and his father ran the officers mess. It also contained the Home Postal Depot for armed forces mail. Behind the northern line station Mil Hill East, a huge gas processing plant, a large football pitch (where i played) a massive building know as the National medical research laboratory, two large pubs and lots of green belt land.
      All completely built over now including the demolition of the huge research laboratory. Thousands of new homes and now obviously lot of more recent arrivals in the area. It makes me very sad to see this. Corporate greed and mal-administration over 30 years by our useless and pointless successive governments have wrecked many parts of England.

  18. Glorious day! I have all the windows open for the first time since last year!

  19. Kremlin issues nuke threat to Nato-bound Nordic states by James Kilner.

    THE Kremlin has said that it will station nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad if Finland and Sweden join Nato.

    Dmitriy Medvedev, the deputy head of the Russian Security Council, also warned that if the two Nordic countries ditched their neutral status, Russia would “seriously strengthen its ground forces and air defence systems”.

    “It will no longer be possible to talk about any non-nuclear status of the Baltics – the balance must be restored,” he said on his Telegram channel.

    Russia’s only access to the Baltic Sea is through Kaliningrad, an exclave between Lithuania and Poland that was captured from Germany in the Second World War and turned into part of the Soviet Union.

    Positioning nuclear missiles in the exclave would give the Kremlin the ability to strike most central European capitals.

    Finland and Sweden have traditionally been neutral countries but they have both said that president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has changed their thinking. Sweden has reportedly already made the decision to join the alliance, with Finland likely to follow.

    Finland, which shares an 832-mile border with Russia, has a particularly strained history with Moscow. In November 1939, the Red Army invaded it, sparking a three-month conflict in which 150,000 people died.

    Mr Medvedev said that Nato would not give Finland or Sweden any extra defence just higher taxes and “increased tensions along their borders”, adding: “Let’s hope that the sanity of our northern neighbours still wins out.”

    Ingrida Simonyte, Lithuania’s prime minister, said Russia’s threat to increase its military presence in the region was “nothing new”. She added: “Kaliningrad is a very militarised zone – has been for many years.”

    Russian short-range ballistic missiles capable of carrying a nuclear warhead have been deployed in Kaliningrad since 2016.

    Why does the Daily Telegraph employ clueless, uneducated reporters, such as James Kilner? This chump states, in a national newspaper, that “Russia’s only access to the Baltic Sea is through Kaliningrad”.

    Utter hogwash. The St Petersburg area has a 520km coastline directly on the Gulf of Finland — the eastern arm of the Baltic — between the Finnish and Estonian borders. Time to cull your staff, DT.

      1. I’m all prepared for an invasion. I’m stockpiling beetroot so that I can stand in the street offering mugs of hot borscht to the crew of passing tanks.

        1. Do you have any insights into why at this particular delicate moment, Sweden and Finland have chosen to throw away decades of neutrality in order to expand NATO?
          It really does not look like a smart move.

          1. IIRC, it’s been a theme for years, and now the Ukraine war has given the joiners the ammunition they need to join NATO.

          2. I wonder if the silly sods realise that if it comes to a punch up they will be required to enter the ring immediately.
            Neutral countries are vital, if only for conducting negotiations between protagonists.

          3. At the risk of sounding sexist (which, as you l know, I am not), both Sweden and Finland now have female prime ministers. Traditional thinking goes along the lines of females being more peaceful and conciliatory than males and much less hawk-like. I’m not sure that theory still holds.

            In any case, what does it matter? Every single country on the planet is run by imbeciles. It’s only a matter of time before the balloon goes up.

    3. I was thinking the same, Grizz. Surely these bozos have even a smidgin of geography? No wonder they parrot government propaganda, they don’t know enough to contradict, or even question.

      1. Precisely, Paul. Newspapers, like governments, are run and funded by cretins. It is only natural that cretins employ other cretins to produce their inanities.

        1. If something is depleted, surely it must have been pleted first?
          I’ll get me coat…

          1. I should have got that, but I was too gorm-free, hap-free, wit-free and clue-free to understand.🤣

            Does something have to be mantled before it can be dismantled?

          5. … and appointed before being disappointed?
            Weird language, English.
            You can cut a tree down and cut it up, but not cut it up then cut it down.
            You have to sit down before you can sit up.

          6. Sort this lot, then:

            English – some oddities

            Let’s face it – English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple.

            English muffins weren’t invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren’t sweet, are meat.

            We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

            And why is it that writers write but fingers don’t fing, grocers don’t groce and hammers don’t ham?

            If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn’t the plural of booth, beeth?

            One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices?

            Doesn’t it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

            If teachers taught, why don’t preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetable, what does a humanitarian eat?

            Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell?

            How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

            You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which, an alarm goes off by going on.

            English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race, which, of course, is not a race at all.

            That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are on, they are invisible.

            PS. – Why doesn’t ‘Buick’ rhyme with ‘quick’?

      2. Hence the importance of Crimea and the fact that pretending that Russia gave away its only true warm port to Ukraine is obviously a deliberate misreading of history. And, that this empty gesture was made is further proof that the Russians never considered Ukraine to be a separate country in the first place. You don’t give away your most precious naval asset to a foreign country, friendly or otherwise. I can’t imagine or know of a country that has ever done such a thing. Does anyone know of such an event in history?

  20. Kremlin issues nuke threat to Nato-bound Nordic states by James Kilner.

    THE Kremlin has said that it will station nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad if Finland and Sweden join Nato.

    Dmitriy Medvedev, the deputy head of the Russian Security Council, also warned that if the two Nordic countries ditched their neutral status, Russia would “seriously strengthen its ground forces and air defence systems”.

    “It will no longer be possible to talk about any non-nuclear status of the Baltics – the balance must be restored,” he said on his Telegram channel.

    Russia’s only access to the Baltic Sea is through Kaliningrad, an exclave between Lithuania and Poland that was captured from Germany in the Second World War and turned into part of the Soviet Union.

    Positioning nuclear missiles in the exclave would give the Kremlin the ability to strike most central European capitals.

    Finland and Sweden have traditionally been neutral countries but they have both said that president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has changed their thinking. Sweden has reportedly already made the decision to join the alliance, with Finland likely to follow.

    Finland, which shares an 832-mile border with Russia, has a particularly strained history with Moscow. In November 1939, the Red Army invaded it, sparking a three-month conflict in which 150,000 people died.

    Mr Medvedev said that Nato would not give Finland or Sweden any extra defence just higher taxes and “increased tensions along their borders”, adding: “Let’s hope that the sanity of our northern neighbours still wins out.”

    Ingrida Simonyte, Lithuania’s prime minister, said Russia’s threat to increase its military presence in the region was “nothing new”. She added: “Kaliningrad is a very militarised zone – has been for many years.”

    Russian short-range ballistic missiles capable of carrying a nuclear warhead have been deployed in Kaliningrad since 2016.

    Why does the Daily Telegraph employ clueless, uneducated reporters, such as James Kilner? This chump states, in a national newspaper, that “Russia’s only access to the Baltic Sea is through Kaliningrad”.

    Utter hogwash. The St Petersburg area has a 520km coastline directly on the Gulf of Finland — the eastern arm of the Baltic — between the Finnish and Estonian borders. Time to cull your staff, DT.

    2. Morning Anne

      Here in S Dorset , there has been a run on fuel .

      Weymouth Morrisons are out and Wemouth Sainsbury limited supplies . Our village also limited and Bere Regis Shell is £1.82 per litre , that won’t last long because so many people / visitors now own monster cars , and are searching everwhere to top their tanks up.

      The situation is dire .

      Stay cationers are here in abundance and the roads are as chaotic as ever . Anyone with a spare field for camping wagons and tents are really quids in .

      1. I never travel anywhere on Bank Holidays. It’s always chaos. Imagine being at the Airport or wanting to get on a ferry at Dover ! They are insane.

        Good morning.

        1. Since it is so predictable – regardless of whether or not bat clap is the excuse de nos jours – my sympathy is very limited.

          1. I laugh at the pictures. There have been delays and long queues at Heathrow for weeks. Then they turn up Easter weekend and are surprised.

  23. Apparently France will be ‘difficult’ if we return the gimmigrant criminals to them.

    Why, precisely do we care? It’s their problem.

      2. I simply cannot think why we give a hoot what they think. They’ve dumped their problem on us. Why should we solve it?

        Turn the boats back, destroy them. Let the wasters swim to shore. If the French don’t like it, tough!

          3. I thought the surrender monkeys had bleached it.
            I expect that particular flag will be out in force on the 23rd of a[April.

      1. Clear blue skies here, so very sunny and 60f already, it is going to be warm.

        2. Good timing. I have my garden room all sorted out and friends from Scotland are visiting for the weekend. It’s going to get very boozy here. And they have brought the famous square sausages !

          3. Friends? Scotland? What can you be thinking of?…Lock down your valuables when the Border Reivers come to town…

          6. What are they? Made from the entrails of dead Haggis shot in the off season?

    2. Quite warm for April, though. It’s normally pissing down and double guaranteed over the bank holiday. Must be global warming.

      1. Ah yes. Jolly Easter Bank Holidays, holed up in the car with my parents and brother, watching the sleet obscure the sea view beyond the windscreen.

  25. Welcome to the Free Speech Union’s weekly newsletter, our round-up of the free speech news of the week. As with all our work, this newsletter depends on the support of our members and donors, so if you’re not already a paying member please sign up today or encourage a friend to join, and help us turn the tide against cancel culture.

    Free Speech Union to launch in Scotland

    The forthcoming launch of the Free Speech Union in Scotland was the Times’s top Scotland story. The Times reported that SNP MP Joanna Cherry QC, education policy professor Lindsay Paterson, former Scottish Conservatives deputy leader Murdo Fraser MSP and award-winning poet Jenny Lindsay were joining the Advisory Board, along with journalist and former University of Edinburgh rector Iain Macwhirter, director of the Catholic Media Office Peter Kearney and former SNP deputy leader Jim Sillars. The Times quoted Jenny Lindsay on the toxic literary cancel culture in Scotland, saying: “I dearly hope for robust discussion about re-energising Scotland’s literary landscape so that writers and thinkers feel free to explore complex contemporary issues without fears of no-platforming, ostracisation, smearing and loss of livelihood.”

    There was much enthusiasm for the FSU in Scotland below the line in the Times, with posters welcoming the move in the face of increasing censoriousness in Scottish life and asking where to sign up. If you’re based in Scotland or know people who could benefit from membership, please sign up and share.

    As though to illustrate the need for intervention, Edinburgh University UCU president Grant Buttars described the University’s new branch of Academics for Academic Freedom as “sickening” and “a haven for racists, transphobes and other assorted bigots”. Scottish Greens minister Lorna Slater told the Herald that the BBC needs to stop platforming gender-critical views, saying that it “only recently stopped putting on climate deniers because they required balance. We wouldn’t put balance on the question of racism or anti-Semitism, but we allow this fictional notion of balance when it comes to anti-trans [views]. The whole thing is disgusting.” Elsewhere in the interview Slater had claimed, of the SNP-Greens coalition, “We don’t do shouty negative politics – we do ‘working together’… We believe in collaboration, cooperation and consensus.” In the Spectator, Debbie Hayton said that Slater “cited climate deniers as not worthy of a platform. I’d suggest biology deniers like Slater are another.” In the Times, Alex Massie said of Slater’s ‘no debate’ tactics: “The arrogance is breathtaking, and all the more so given that it is, at least in part, in thrall to pieties that are demonstrably untrue.”

    Edinburgh Event: Why Free Speech Matters

    Please join us for a members’ event on 21 April in Edinburgh where internationally renowned free speech advocate and author Jacob Mchangama will be introducing his highly acclaimed new book, Free Speech: A Global History from Socrates to Social Media. The evening will be hosted by Toby Young, General Secretary of the Free Speech Union; Toby’s Spectator review of Jacob’s book can be found here. Toby and Jacob will be joined by a distinguished panel, including SNP MP and newly announced FSU Scotland Advisory Council member Joanna Cherry QC, to discuss the importance of free speech and how it can be defended today. Tickets can be booked here.

    Nottingham holds out on Sewell degree, and Durham decolonises maths

    Nottingham University is still resisting calls for it to reverse its decision to rescind the offer of an honorary degree to former Government race tsar Dr Tony Sewell, with the rationale that Sewell’s presence would “overshadow” graduation ceremonies and upset students. We wrote to the EHRC asking them to investigate whether Nottingham’s decision to single Sewell out as a subject of controversy was motivated by racial prejudice; 50 Tory MPs also wrote to the University, highlighting the “absurdity” of granting honorary degrees to disgraced former Malaysian PM Najib Razak and Uighur re-education camp denying ex-Chinese ambassador Liu Xiaoming while refusing to do so for Sewell, “simply because he earned the ire of a few frustrated ideologues for his widely welcomed work” on the Government’s race report. In the Spectator, Tom Slater recalled the racist abuse aimed at Sewell on the day the report was released and said: “But rather than stand by one of their own, someone on the receiving end of abuse and character assassination, Nottingham has essentially joined the pile-on. An accomplished black Brit is lambasted for having an opinion, and the high-status move is to side with his critics. This is modern racial politics summed up.” In Spiked, Rakib Ehsan said: “This speaks to a deep problem in Britain’s higher-education sector. It seems nothing offends our universities more than someone challenging their grievance-fuelled, identitarian narrative on race.”

    As nearly 50 universities signed a pledge not to use confidentiality clauses to silence campus misconduct, Oxford and Cambridge continued to hold out, with no colleges having signed up despite the recent incident at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where it emerged that the College had instructed a student not to speak to public media about an alleged rape.

    Durham University’s Mathematics Department has been given a guide to decolonising its curriculum, including considering the cultural origins of mathematical concepts and asking whether mathematicians cited are “mostly white or male”. In another Spectator piece, Tom Slater said the decolonisation drive demonstrated two things: “First, that identity politics in education is no longer confined to the arts and humanities – even maths and the hard sciences aren’t safe from such relativism. Second, for all their talk of ‘decolonisation’, it is woke activists who think of ethnic minorities as lesser beings, incapable of mastering ‘western’ subjects unless those subjects are completely rewired beforehand.”

    Stonewall sulks on

    After the government’s ‘Safe to Be Me’ conference was cancelled due to Stonewall leading a mass boycott over the decision not to ban “conversion therapy” dealing with gender dysphoria, a Times leader said that Stonewall’s intolerance of any but the most extreme viewpoints over trans issues had “alienated” other organisations along with the general public. The Times pointed out that, at a time when homosexuality continued to be criminalised in many countries, punished by some with the death penalty, an opportunity for Britain to lead change on a “genuinely existential issue” had been squandered by Stonewall’s intransigence.

    In the Telegraph, Zoe Strimpel compared recent British controversies over trans rights to the situation in the US, saying that Boris Johnson’s “balance between zest for LGBT rights and common sense” would be “unimaginable” from any US politician, where “the debate has become almost universally nasty, polarised and extreme.” Strimpel observed that “Britain has imported many of the horrors that gave rise to the American culture war, such as the doctrine of intersectionality, which pits people of varying degrees of ‘oppression’ against each other” but concluded: “Unlike America, however, we are still a country where our leaders can speak clearly and with sensitivity on matters as vexed and uncomfortable as gender identity and its relationship to sexual anatomy. In Britain, at least, there’s still cause for hope that the current mess can be resolved decently.”

    And as Left Twitter erupted into outrage and sorrow over photos of JK Rowling enjoying a drunken lunch with other ‘Respect My Sex’ activists, Kathleen Stock shared her top five tips for managing fractious transactivists in a brilliant piece of Supernanny satire, including getting them off their screens and outdoors and setting boundaries: “This appears to be a particularly hard one for transactivists to accept, tending as they do to think that all boundaries are fascist – so start small. Begin by casually saying things like ‘apples can’t be oranges’ and ‘tables can’t be chairs’. (If they get cross and start calling you the ‘fruit police’ or the ‘furniture police’, calmly ignore).”

    Guilty verdict for Amess’s killer – and the serial avoidance of talking about Islamism

    Sir David Amess MP’s attacker, Ali Harbi Ali, was found guilty of murder, having told the court: “I wanted to kill David and every MP who voted for bombings in Syria. I wanted to die, be shot and be a hero.” Spiked’s Tom Slater said that, in the aftermath of Amess’s death, “the political and media classes seemed desperate to present this murder as something else entirely – as an act of senseless violence whipped up by the ‘coarseness’ of political debate.” In the Critic, Stephen Daisley described politicians’ and journalists’ avoidance of Harbi’s immediately apparent Islamist motives as “cowardice”, comparing the moral panic about abusive behaviour on social media and calls for new legislation to censor it, including speeding up the Second Reading of the Online Safety Bill, to “the mosques of Southend, which released a joint statement within 24 hours denouncing ‘an indefensible atrocity’ that was ‘committed in the name of blind hatred’ and urged that ‘the perpetrator be swiftly brought to justice’.” In the Spectator, Sam Ashworth-Hayes added, sardonically: “The twisted ideology that drove Ali to kill a decent man must have been free speech on social media, the idea that ‘legal but harmful’ content has a place in democratic debate. Our MPs, in their judgement, could see nothing in his words or actions that indicated otherwise. Or nothing they were willing to talk about, at any rate.” And Wasiq Wasiq said that the case of the Batley Grammar School teacher, who was still in hiding, indicated that illiberal Islamic blasphemy laws were creeping into liberal democracies like Britain, as in France with the Charlie Hebdo and Samuel Paty attacks.

    Heather Mac Donald writing in City Journal made a similar point about the reaction to this week’s New York City subway shooting, with all the people commenting on it tip-toeing around the fact that the shooter was a black nationalist – or outright ignoring it:

    Had a white male entered a New York subway car in a construction vest and gas mask, carrying a hatchet, a nine-millimeter handgun, extended ammo magazines, gasoline, fireworks, and two smoke grenades; had he then shot off at least 33 rounds, hitting ten people, the Biden administration and the media would have immediately raised an alarm about white nationalist violence. The shooter’s race would have led every story about such an attempted massacre; pundits would have immediately speculated about hate crime and domestic terrorism…

    If that hypothetical white subway shooter had then been discovered to have posted tirades about black people, had he called for whites to get a gun and start shooting blacks, the global media would be in nuclear meltdown about white supremacy. Protests would be breaking out across the country and corporations would be emitting an avalanche of press releases about America’s racial injustice.

    Instead, since the smoke-bomb detonating, race-ranting shooter on a New York City N train Tuesday morning was black, his race and apparent anti-white hatred are nearly taboo subjects.

    Social media and the genealogy of culture war

    In UnHerd, FSU Advisory Council member Andrew Doyle wrote about the hyperbolic accusations thrown around by activists and how these lead to defamation, saying: “Many activists are explicit about their refusal to debate their ideas – for the simple reason they would collapse under scrutiny – and one of the ways this can be achieved is to destabilise shared definitions of words. In their world, libel simply cannot exist, because the meaning of language has become a purely subjective matter.”

    Another member of our Advisory Council, Eric Kaufman, argued in UnHerd that Francis Fukuyama, though correct in identifying that “Liberalism is in peril”, failed to understand the role of “Left-modernism” in undermining it: “Progressive illiberalism began with affirmative action in the 70s, cooked up political correctness and speech codes in the 90s, and metastasised into cancel culture and anti-whiteness in the 2010s.”

    Kat Rosenfield, also in UnHerd, looked at how the hubris of MeToo led to its collapse: “At the height of the movement’s influence, a choice was made: to be relentless, to rejoice in punishing those who not only transgressed but questioned the orthodoxy, and to scoff at the idea that these excesses might ever come back to haunt us… It took a while to realise that we had created a toxic culture in which contrition was seen as pointless. And it was, ironically, the greatest gift the movement could give to its enemies: the courage that comes from having nothing to lose.”

    Jonathan Haidt wrote in the Atlantic about how social media – and specifically the retweet and share tools that enabled information to go viral – “encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics”, shredding social norms, trust and consensus. Haidt said: “The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves… When our public square is governed by mob dynamics unrestrained by due process, we don’t get justice and inclusion; we get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and truth.” In Persuasion, Emma Camp, whose New York Times article about the chilling effects on campus free speech provoked widespread online ire from US progressives, wrote about how a culture of vindictiveness and bad-faith assertions create a climate of fear.

    As Elon Musk elected not to take a seat on Twitter’s board, instead positioning himself to take over the company , the New York Post reported that Twitter workers described the atmosphere there as a “shit-show” and felt “super stressed”. Satirical news site the Babylon Bee wrote: “With Elon Musk becoming Twitter’s largest stakeholder… many within the company are worried he may turn their free speech platform into a platform that actually allows free speech.” As predicted, Musk has now launched a takeover bid, offering $41.4bn for all remaining shares and writing in a letter to Bret Taylor, Twitter’s Board Chair: “I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy. However, since making my investment I now realise the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form.”

    Event: Living Freedom Summer School

    For free speech enthusiasts aged 18-30 the Living Freedom Summer School, organised by the BoI charity and supported by the Free Speech Champions project, provides a unique opportunity to be part of a stimulating forum for around 60 young advocates of freedom who will attend expert talks, hear from writers, critics and campaigners, and participate in debates, seminars and workshops. The three-day residential school takes place in central London between 30 June and 2 July. Applications must be submitted by Sunday 29 May. If you are over the age limit, please spread the word to younger folk.

    Gillian Philip Fundraiser

    We’ve launched a CrowdJustice fundraiser on behalf of our member Gillian Philip, a writer of young-adult fiction whose contract was terminated after she expressed the belief that biological sex is real. Her mortal sin was adding the hashtag #IStandwithJKRowling to her Twitter account, which immediately led to demands that her publisher dump her and, needless to say, it did just that. Gillian’s contract was ended, and her agent abandoned her, just one month after the death of her husband. The effect on her was shattering. Today she works as a courier and an HGV driver to make ends meet. Please help Gillian fight for her freedom of speech by giving what you can to the crowdfunder here.

    Sharing the newsletter

    As with all our work, this newsletter depends on the support of our members and donors, so if you’re not already a paying member please sign up today or encourage a friend to join, and help us turn the tide against cancel culture.

    You can share our newsletters on social media with the buttons below to help us spread the word. If someone has shared this newsletter with you and you’d like to join the FSU, you can find our website here.

    1. Grizzly, thank you for posting these FSU newsletters here. I appreciate it a great deal as I’m sure others here do too.

      1. My pleasure, JR. I joined three years ago because I passionately defend free speech. My posting of the newsletter is an attempt to propagate that freedom.

        1. I would join but for one thing. Toby Youngs cowardly reaction when he was asked if he believed in the free speech of Tommy Robinson and waffled instead of answering the question. I take the position that Elon Musk supports, free speech is absolute. Musk puts his principles in action. When asked to censor the Russians via his communication satellites due to the Ukraine furore he refused even though he supports the Ukrainians.

    2. …. “I wanted to die, be shot and be a hero.”
      And those nasty, waycist, white and – aarrgghhhhhhhh – Christian colonialists refused to grant you your dearest wish.
      How very dare they.

    2. Yep, It is the search engine I use. Anyone got suggestions for an alternative that isn’t in the business of censorship?

      3. Brave
        Mojeek
        eTools
        MetaGer

        My standard test for political correctness is to search “European Art” on every new browser, and look at the images that come up. I forget which ones passed of the above. Google is the worst, of course.

    3. Goodbye Me Duck!
      It seems that DDG is not much more than Bing with better privacy? There is also a report of an experienced white male programmer applying for a job at DDG and being turned down; he reapplied as a black lesbian with no programming experience and was invited for a second stage interview – how true that is I have no idea! Either way I have stopped using it – frankly it’s not a good search engine either.

    4. Goodbye Me Duck!
      It seems that DDG is not much more than Bing with better privacy? There is also a report of an experienced white male programmer applying for a job at DDG and being turned down; he reapplied as a black lesbian with no programming experience and was invited for a second stage interview – how true that is I have no idea! Either way I have stopped using it – frankly it’s not a good search engine either.

    5. Goodbye Me Duck!
      It seems that DDG is not much more than Bing with better privacy? There is also a report of an experienced white male programmer applying for a job at DDG and being turned down; he reapplied as a black lesbian with no programming experience and was invited for a second stage interview – how true that is I have no idea! Either way I have stopped using it – frankly it’s not a good search engine either.

    2. Hmph. I didn’t get it. I had four letters right in the second go then four wrong guesses. 😕

  28. ‘Morning All

    As the Leftwaffe froths hysterically finally the Con government comes up with a solution to the Gimmegrant problem, Rwanda

    Oh wait,is that an election I see coming up??

    I foresee two minor problems…….

    1 Without withdrawing from the UN Migration pact that May signed as a final poison pill for the British people the first Blairite judge this gets in front of will declare it illegal

    2 I am sure all the gimmegrants will be delighted to have their dreams of bennies for life,housing health care etc etc dashed by a flight to Rwanda,what could possibly go wrong……..

    http://ifap.blogsport.de/images/plane.png

    If bloody only…..

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6ea29540c1fa2097dcf16cfa3c8b0f58ef400b79c019eb8374f17836d5a9d699.jpg

    1. I wonder what will happen when there is a riot on an immigrant-carrying plane which causes an accident which brings down the plane and kills all the passengers and crew.

      Will there be weeping and wailing and ger-nashing of teeth or will there be universal rejoicing?

  29. Would you let your toddler go to the shop without you?

    Forget Home Alone – now a TV series is sending kids out on errands. Is it wise, asks Miranda Levy

    A toddler earnestly wanders the supermarket to buy fishcakes, while another is sent on a bus to pick up his father’s jacket: how will they fare? This is the premise of Old Enough, a new Netflix Japanese reality show, where children aged between two and five are sent on errands, all the while being secretly filmed by a camera crew.

    Adorable, or grossly irresponsible? The jury is out. But what the show has done is ignite a debate: what is the acceptable amount of freedom to give a pre-schooler; and where does a

    How long is that lead? Old Enough follows children aged two to five out on errands

    helicopter parent become smothering, or a laissez-faire family dangerously lax?

    Sheri Jacobson, a psychotherapist and founder of harleytherapy.co.uk, says: “In the past, independence wasn’t a target, it just happened. Kids had to work in farms and fields alongside their parents, they walked along quiet streets.”

    Jacobson agrees that in modern times, there is a sense that our children are over-protected. “Part of this is necessary, with busier roads and so on. But young people still need to learn about themselves, their boundaries, to foster their sense of independence – while still feeling ‘contained’ and safe.”

    Here, we let three writers off their toddler safety harnesses to recall the liberty (or otherwise) of their own childhoods, and how freely they raised their own families.

    My brother has a theory that, in his words, “no one thought of anything until the year 2000”. What he means is that during our childhood in the 80s and 90s, adults spent much less time considering the dangers that lay in wait for kids than we parents do today.

    There was the time we went camping in rural North Yorkshire and our parents and their friends sat drinking tea by the tents while all of us young children went off to play in a river, unobserved. Perhaps we could all swim. Or perhaps not. I wouldn’t dream of allowing my kids this freedom, scarred as I am by vague memories of headlines about tragic drowning incidents that, in my head, are 95 per cent likely to happen the second I don’t pay attention.

    My parents were generally more safety-conscious than most. But when it came to keeping a close eye on our activities, they were more laid back. We always played out, unsupervised, in the back street behind our terrace in Leeds. (I am years – decades – off letting my children play in our back street in London.)

    As a parent, unlikely accidents and abductions loom large in my imagination. If I lose sight of one of my children in a playground for a split second, I am gripped by irrational panic. I micromanage their safety at all hours. Is it healthy? Almost certainly not. But, you know, how could I ever forgive myself?

    I spent my infancy during those carefree halcyon days of the early 1950s in a small hamlet in a mining community. As a three- and four-year old, I was frequently sent to the local grocery shop (a Co-op) just along the road by my mother and grandmother to buy certain items. I still remember the dividend check numbers from those days (4611 for mum, 843 for grandma) that I was asked to recite by the shop manager.

    It was certainly a different world back then.

    1. When I was a child of about 7 in St Mawes my mother’s elder sister lived with us. She had married a ne’er-do-well and had had an interesting life which included running a club in Soho for some years until it was ‘busted’. She never had children of her own but we children all loved her because she was rather disreputable and told us marvellous stories!

      Aunt ‘Bill’ (as we called her) used to send me down to The Rising Sun to buy her a packet of Olivier cigarettes and a bottle of gin and my reward was a bottle of ginger beer which I drank at the pub – though, of course, not in the bar. Campbell Marshall, the landlord, knew me well and was happy to hand over both the cigarettes and the gin to a 7 year old.

      Campbell would probably be put in prison if he did that now and the social services would have made a call on my parents!

      1. Amusing that the main outlet in St Mawes is now Coop branded. I often wonder whether if I gave my mother’s dividend number, 12505, and asked for a milk white, they could provide it.. I think not because I think the numbers were regional….

        1. In my day The Rising Sun was a purveyor of St Austell Brewery’s beers (or Snozzle as we pronounced it).

          The brewery was run by a delightful old chap called George Luck with whom I did some sailing. His son, Adam, took over when he retired.

      2. Olivier cigarettes? Are they British? I thought I had heard of every brand of British cigarettes (and a few foreign ones) but Olivier is a new name to me.

        2. https://www.nmni.com/collections/belumw2011390

          Gallaher Collection; OLIVIER showcard. OLIVIER TIPPED CIGARETTES. 10 for 1’8, 20 for 3’4. QUALITY WITH ECONOMY. With fold-out stand at back for counter display.
          OLIVIER was launched in 1956 by Gallaher under Benson & Hedges brand. Named after Sir Laurence Olivier (1907-89). He received two pence for every 1,000 cigarettes sold, was given an advance against the first year’s royalties and reported to have received 500 packs of 20 every week for his own use and to distribute. Olivier posed for the inital advertising launch of the cigarette campaign. Olivier was loyal to his brand as Sir Ian McKellan remembers when he started working at the National Theatre Company, founded by Olivier, that there was a cigarette machine only ever filled with the Oliver brand.

          1. I don’t recall ever seeing them in the Chesterfield (town, not sofa or cigarette) area.

        3. https://www.nmni.com/collections/belumw2011390

          Gallaher Collection; OLIVIER showcard. OLIVIER TIPPED CIGARETTES. 10 for 1’8, 20 for 3’4. QUALITY WITH ECONOMY. With fold-out stand at back for counter display.
          OLIVIER was launched in 1956 by Gallaher under Benson & Hedges brand. Named after Sir Laurence Olivier (1907-89). He received two pence for every 1,000 cigarettes sold, was given an advance against the first year’s royalties and reported to have received 500 packs of 20 every week for his own use and to distribute. Olivier posed for the inital advertising launch of the cigarette campaign. Olivier was loyal to his brand as Sir Ian McKellan remembers when he started working at the National Theatre Company, founded by Olivier, that there was a cigarette machine only ever filled with the Oliver brand.

    2. I have seen some of the programme on You Tube but it is rather disingenuous to project Western problems onto Japan. For children it is a country that is still pretty safe. Rather like England was safe for kids in the 1940-50’s when you could play all day and no parent gave it a second thought as long as you were home for dinner. The Japanese slant is about how willing adults are to help a child on his or her quest, the programme has nothing to do with the potential danger of being kidnapped.

    3. Were the McCanns right to leave their three-year-old daughter and twin two-year-olds on their own in an apartment in Portugal?

      1. But they’d properly been put to sleep. By both parents, even though they forgot to tell each other.

        1. Did the police pursuing the investigation carry out an audit on the sedative drugs in the hospitals where the McCanns worked?

    4. I remember being sent to the village shop (run by a Mr Profitt!) When I was about nine or ten, usually to buy cigarettes!

    5. I still remember the dividend check numbers from those days…

      38077. That was my mothers!

    9. I played in the Nigerian bush, with my friends. Snakes, stinging things, wild dogs… holes to fall in, trees to fall out of, wasps, ants. Never came to any harm. Oh, yes, and thorns… lots and lots of thorns.
      The general risk-averseness and levels of panic seems to be correlated with the feminisation of society, women being programmed to be risk averse (with good cause, evolutionally speaking).

      1. I used to take my (actually my brother’s, but he got tired of it) dog into the woods or ride my bike for miles when I was a child.

    10. I played in the Nigerian bush, with my friends. Snakes, stinging things, wild dogs… holes to fall in, trees to fall out of, wasps, ants. Never came to any harm. Oh, yes, and thorns… lots and lots of thorns.
      The general risk-averseness and levels of panic seems to be correlated with the feminisation of society, women being programmed to be risk averse (with good cause, evolutionally speaking).

    11. The risk of harm by unknown adults to children can be looked at in many ways.
      Suffice to say that vehicular traffic was much less, and slower, there were fewer outsiders and, lurking in the distant background, capital punishment.

    1. Morning! The appeal to authority continues to astonish me. How much more corrupted and lacking in credibility does the authority have to be before the childish trust is broken?

    3. There was an incident when a Korean(?) fishing fleet in the Pacific was bombarded by cows falling from the sky.
      They had run amok in a freight plane, so the crew opened the tail ramp and let them out before they wrecked the plane.
      What’s the likelihood of being damaged by a cow falling out of the sky mid-Pacific? And how would you explain to your insurers?

    1. Only it’s rubbish. It completely ignores Elon Musk’s motivation but it reveals how dishonest left winger Jeff Bezos is, considering he owns the Washington Post.
      “Who Really Owns The Washington Post?
      The newspaper was purchased by Jeff Bezos for US$250 million in 2013. Currently, Nash Holdings LLC, a company controlled by Bezos, owns the newspaper.”
      https://www.ipsinternational.org/does-bezos-own-the-washington-post/
      Another NWO muck spreader.

    1. Thanks Bobon,
      Our House choir had to sing that in Eisteddfod one year. We won, IIRC

    2. Very few people will be able to afford to buy electric cars, so there will be much less traffic on the road, therefore fewer traffic jams.

    5. Couldn’t they turn motorways into giant induction loops powered by roadside windmills and solar farms? Then the cars could recharge while they are stationary or moving. Of course it might also slowly cook the occupants, but at least it would be a green solution.

        1. It’s gorgeous here and supposed to be nice for the whole long weekend. Bet the beach is busy.

  34. NoTTlers…………..I ask my learned friends
    ‘Would YOU live in Rwanda?’

    Adil Ray erupts at Tory MP ‘It’s not good enough for you!’
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2b97a437581a8c265a0dc87483fb77fe81d4b76ab2201cbbdfaee5348144cd4b.jpg

    ADIL RAY furiously hit out at Tory MP Tom Pursglove on Good Morning Britain over the Government’s plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.
    https://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/1596438/adil-ray-erupt-tom-pursglove-rwanda-asylum-seeker-gmb

    1. Oh dear. Has the Left gone full-on racist?
      Surely they’re not suggesting that countries run by bleks are less caring and efficient than those run by evil, white colonialists?

    2. Adil Ray, another Pakistani Muslim with a vested interest in having as many of his compatriots flooding our country and making it theirs. A more relevant question is would he be willing to go to Pakistan and live there? His question to Tom Pursglove was completely irrelevant to the issue. If Rwanda acts as a deterrent to these people invading the UK, good.

    3. He should have put on a Holy Joe face and said, “I’m just thinking of the perilous crossings and danger to these (illegal) immigrants that will be avoided as this plan will shut down the smuggling operation.”

    4. Have a look on Goggle Earth it look fairly civilised to me Kimihurura large houses some with swimming pools, lots of restaurants lovely tidy streets lush plant life.
      I’ve got t’ book up my passage………….

      1. He’s a poisonous piece of crap with a long history. Just google ‘adil ray controversy’ and you’ll find a few stories.

    6. Nothing wrong with Rwanda, it is 28 years since the genocide! At the time they showed a lot of respect for foreigners, murdering a number of UN peacekeepers.

      Perfect place to go.

    1. Unfortunately, it’s a bit late for that, we should have started when all the ’empire made’ stuff began to appear in the shops in the late 50s. Supposedly Hong Kong, but of course, made anywhere on the Chinese mainland. Talking of which, JCB had better look to their laurels. Where they pulled down one very nice house at the bottom corner of my garden, and are proceeding with 9 flats on the same area, two brand new diggers, branded Liugong, are doing the ground work:

      https://liugong-europe.com/uk/

        1. From memory the actual JCB machinery is made in India. Personally I find that deeply saddening but inevitable as it’s simply too expensive to make things in this country because of taxation and energy. Net zero. Net zero jobs.

          1. Are they? How sad. But you are right. Net Zero has to go, along with the clique of leftists who invented it…

          2. I think some research, and the designing of the machines is done here. This is why when the bastard Blair and the scum Brown wanted to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’ all they did was add mouths to feed. We, as an economy were changing. Due to tax, regulation and cost were moving to a knowledge economy. You needed brains, not people.

            Case in point: the packaing for Gilette razors is made here. The design and marketing is done *here*. The manufacturing is done in China. The brainy stuff we do. The boring making is done somewhere much, much cheaper.

            OK, we do make cars – and we’re good at it, but the factories are heavily automated with tight supply lines but the really clever stuff is the McLarens, the Formula 1 cars (most are designed here). It’s all small scale, niche, but high end brain work.

            Labour flooded us with dross who couldn’t contribute to the economy – nor were they intended to. They were just another cost, another drain for which Brown punishingly taxed the middle class out of spite and started the most miserable and destructive decline in history. The worst bit is that the Conservatives didn’t and don’t offer anything different, despite being given the mandate and encouragement to do so. We could be bounding ahead as an economy. Roaring with wealth and prosperity and where are we? Suffocating under offensive taxes, endless regulation, a tsunami of waste, dross and gimmigrants.

            I hate Labour for pouring toxic waste into clean water. I hate the Tories are adding sewage.

          3. Are they? How sad. But you are right. Net Zero has to go, along with the clique of leftists who invented it…

      2. Actually we should have started further back than that. I knew that it was a mistake when Nixon and Kissinger started down this disastrous road. I knew because I knew Tibetans and thus had no illusions about China under the CCP. And, as I have said. What we should have been doing all this time is aiding India to the hilt in order to counterbalance and outstrip the CCP. But, naturally enough, Washington knows best and although they objected to India for its “protectionism and socialism” they went all out to help the Chinese Communists. Demonstrating, once again, that the Americans are not only hypocrites but had no real understanding of what they were doing.

        After 40 years in America I became convinced that the Americans were deeply parochial people, indifferent to the world at large other than how it can serve them. And frankly, as time progresses and I become more and more objective about America, which I used to think was the greatest country on earth, I have come to detest them, despite my children being Americans. The USA has caused never ending misery in this world as it purports to be for freedom. Unfortunately in the “free world” there has been no one to counterbalance them since the British Empire fell.

    1. Some friends from Scotland have brought me some Lorne square sausage from their local butcher. No skins.

      In your case you need to start them off slowly and turn often. Pricking with a fork might help.

      1. No problem cooking them (I’m not a believer in pricking them; you lose the juices). My bursting problems come when making them. I get about a yard of filled sausage out of the machine and then, without warning, the skin bursts and there is sausage meat all over the table!

        Lorne square sausages are made with beef.

        1. If it is happening with different skins it sounds like you are being a bit rough with them.

    3. Have you approached Mr Sherlock Holmes, Grizzly. He may be able to help you crack the cas(ings) case. Lol.

  39. Is it just me? I’m reading headlines that Diverting illegals to Rwanda might save lives, etc.

    I’ve got past the point whether I really care about what happens to illegals, some of whom take lives over here, if not make it worse for all of us by taking up our resources that our forefathers have died for us to have and/or that we pay for out of our hard-earned taxes. I don’t care if they don’t get here – obviously drowning is not something that I would wish on anyone, but neither would I wish those people on us. Jolly ungrateful many of them are, too.

    Just keep them away, send them back to France, fly them to Rwanda (yes and we pay for that, of course).

    Perhaps I’m just nasty, but I don’t really feel nasty, just sick to the back teeth.

    1. What is nasty about not wanting criminals in the country? This monumentally expensive, nonsensical waffle over Rwanda is silly. The first boat should have been towed back to France and destroyed within sight of the shore. Rinse, repeat.

      We wouldn’t have had the flood that we have had because they know they’d never make it and waste their money. These are useless economically, dangerous criminally and simply illegal welfare migrants. We have no obligation whatsoever to them.

      1. I suppose it’s because I don’t care anymore how or why they don’t get here, as long as they don’t get here. And that will inevitably include some not so pleasant ways. :o(

      2. I suppose it’s because I don’t care anymore how or why they don’t get here, as long as they don’t get here. And that will inevitably include some not so pleasant ways. :o(

    2. Apparently one way economy tickets on Ethiopian Airlines can be had for less than £300.

      It’s ramadamadingdong, no need to feed them during the flight.

    3. In 1951 Refugee Convention was adopted . Article 1 of the Convention defines a refugee as:

      A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.

      In the UK, the two charities which would later merge to become the Refugee Council, are founded: the British Council for Aid to Refugees (BCAR) and the Standing Conference on Refugees (SCOR)
      Following the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, BCAR was responsible for providing support for over 2,000 east and central European refugees from World War II, and 17,000 Hungarian refugees to Britain
      A residential home, Agnew House, was set up in 1957 for older refugees, many of whom were Holocaust survivors
      In 1968 and 1969 BCAR assisted over 900 Czech refugeeswho had come to the UK following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechslovakia
      https://www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/about-us/our-history/

      1. I know – what our country is doing to us here now is bl**dy unlawful. But who is going to take the PTB/government to court – “well-founded fear” is in the land of linguistic Humpty Dumpty – it means what the Blair-appointed judiciary want it to mean. So we have have to lump it.

      2. I know – what our country is doing to us here now is bl**dy unlawful. But who is going to take the PTB/government to court – “well-founded fear” is in the land of linguistic Humpty Dumpty – it means what the Blair-appointed judiciary want it to mean. So we have have to lump it.

    4. Marianne Lindsey
      16 MIN AGO
      Reply to Single Market – view message
      North Yorkshire is actually a very decent and civilised place to live. That is why it does not deserve to be trashed because of the failure and gutlessness of politicians in Westminster.
      If Sunak (MP for Richmond) had any political nous or any decency, he would be speaking out about this in support of the people of North Yorkshire.

      REPLY
      6

      1. But Sunak hasn’t has neither nous nor decency. Plus, what does he care about the people of North Yorkshire (except for his ticket into parliaments)? Nothing, he and his millionaire previously non-taxpaying wife will just move to the next country where they have or can easily buy a luxury property, and can indulge in their commodious living – having been paid by us to help trash our country in the process.

        That’s what we are up against. Globalists.

    6. Arguably, many people dying of cancer or other treatable conditions were diagnosed or treated too late because our lax immigration policy (!?) swamped the NHS.
      So yes, their presence has taken lives.

    7. Compassion fatigue has long since and for many years left me exhausted. I have nothing left. Just.get.rid. I don’t care how.

  40. Just sent an e-mail to the much missed Tartan Pimpernel regarding one of her BTL Comments on the Rwanda Plan:-

    S Wilson 29 MIN AGO
    Yes, the Tories are running scared. They can’t think beyond the next election, so there is no long term thinking for the benefit of the country.

    I’m not able to comment on the DT Letters as my subscription has ran out, but I agree with your comment regarding the Rwanda plan and the lack of long term planning ability.

    How different might things have been had Blair’s vandalism not robbed the Upper Chamber of the diverse input from the expelled Hereditaries?

    1. For all the bluster, Labour are just as useless. The green twaddle was brought in by Milioaf – who promptly slapped his bills on expenses – Labour hiked every single tax going, and held down the basic rate of tax for 8 miserable, exhausting years, Labour sent council tax soaring, Labour massively expanded the welfare and state to colossal levels.

      Every problem we’re dealing with now is a result of Labour’s tenure. The frustration is that the Conservatives haven’t undone any of it.

      1. 351996+ up ticks,
        Afternoon W,
        lab/ along with tory are segments of the paedophile umbrella how many kept quite in
        rotherham for 16 plus years ?
        the electorate voted whilst their kids were used as pakistani sexual playthings.

    1. Just get rid of them. This is not and can never be allowed ot be a muslim country. If they want to kneel, then do so in their own homes or better still, their own countries.

        1. As far as they are concerned, we pay jizya – the tax levied on dhimmis in an islamic country. Long past time to be rid.

    2. Because the people concerned have no respect for us or our historic buildings or traditions.

          2. I think we are all being pushed into feelings and attitudes we would never have entertained years ago. Patience and tolerance have limits.

          3. 351996+ up ticks,
            Afternoon Lotl,
            Seems like stupidity among the electorate
            has no limitations.

          7. The same is happening here with your first nations. We are continually being fed woke messages about how traumatized they are so we must give a bit more here, excuse a bit more there. Rather than helping tolerance, they are making us more aware and resentful.

            Even so, I still buy gas on the reserve, it’s 15c a litre cheaper.

      2. 351996+ up ticks,
        Afternoon HL,
        The lab/lib/con coalition close shop dictate it should be so these party’s are supported by the majority of the electorate.

  43. Elon Musk makes hostile bid for Twitter – BBC

    Letting Elon Musk buy Twitter would be like giving a baby a loaded gun – Independant

    Can Elon Musk be stopped from taking over Twitter? – CNN News

    Billionaire Elon Musk’s reversal of his decision to join Twitter ’s board opens the door to a hostile takeover – CNBC

    Looks like he is on the right track…

    1. Sad really, that the defiition of the right approach is now how much the Left hate it. Perhaps they’re the ones who are wrong.

      1. He’s certainly rattled a few cages and what obviously worries them is that with his proven track record, he’s almost untouchable.
        He seems a man of principle.

        1. Hello vw Happy Easter to you & family, could you please pass on my greetings to Ped @ped1:disqus who has me blocked but is unaware that I can see & read his posts !

          1. Thank you for your wishes and I hope you and yours too have a Happy Easter. And a warm one. I’m sorry Ped has blocked you, blocking seems rather silly. There are very few really annoying people on this site but each to his own.

      1. Unquestionably, The Greatest Ever Movie ever made and it only failed to sweep the board at the Oscars because of untrammelled racist bias by the Academy.

      1. Have you been to Wroxham lately, Geoff. Roy owns the bloody place. I don’t think there is a single building that doesn’t have his name on it!

    1. There goes Derbyshire…!

      Pat (Nagsman) Bryant came over for supper last night. She’s on cracking good form and sends felicitations and love to all, especially you. She’s working her socks off 8:00am – 6:00pm seven days a week, has shed several lbs, has a healthy bank balance, and has been asked to extend her contract by another 3 months. She admits to getting a bit older and is struggling to get her leg over….a horse. She’s taking four days off over Easter.

      2. Please send her my very best wishes, and congratulations on managing the dreadful economic climate for the self-employed so well. There is a woman with balls!

      3. Pass on my regards, please. Tell her I now need a stepladder to get on the Connemara.

    2. Wonderfully politically incorrect, BoB. Was the character after Clark Gable, David Niven? Or Ramon Navarro?

  46. From the dog’s mouth
    SIR – I am a German shepherd dog aged eight and a half, who was rescued and adopted by my current family three years ago.

    Although it may be possible to provide us canines with plant-based alternatives to ensure that we receive a balanced diet, nature intended us to be carnivorous and I have no wish to sacrifice my current food regime.

    My coat and muscle tone benefit from the kibble and meat I eat, and while I might snatch at grass while out walking, nothing tastes as good as my morning dog choc drops or my daily tripe stick.

    Zeus c/o Colin Cummings
    Yelvertoft, Northamptonshire

    And yes to that from my two as well.

        1. Have both of the movies. Lots of fun, think I’ll watch them at some point this weekend.

          1. Good afternoon Hat.
            I hope all is well on the ‘elf front and that Israel isn’t declaring war on the Ukraine, although the Azovs could do with a good pasting

          1. One of my friends, who ran an outfitters, used to stock an aftershave entitled “Wet Dog”.

    2. These people who want dogs to have a vegan diet are barking. (Well, someone was gonna do it.)

    3. Oscar would endorse that; he scoffs his meat and kibble (twice daily, the second, small meal with Loxicom) and tells me off if I’m late in delivering the goodies (he has managed to suss that bit out).

  47. Wishing Geoff, the Mod Team & all Nottlers and families a Happy Good Friday & Happy Easter. Here in Israel its the start of Passover tonight at sunset, the weathers warm & the Arabs are once again rioting & killing as is their longtime Ramadan tradition!
    Take care of yourself folks & spare a thought for the poor peasants tilling the soil in Rwanda who will now be hosting the next generation of UK Labour voters & potential future Labour , Lib-Dem & Green MP’s!

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6bbc5ae7486e9be7bcb193c8f918b37cd5af34a7792f0ca641e657eccbe3df04.jpg.

        1. Going to do a Sader? If so hope your gathering is wonderful and that you have a great time. Happy Passover. 😊

          1. Thank You Jonathan, I wont be going to a Seder, I will be at home with my 96 year old mother who has Alzheimers & I am her sole carer , I hope you & family have a great & safe Easter !

          2. Sorry about that Elf. It was my favourite thing when my wife was alive, she was Jewish, love horseradish and the banter! But I truly hope you have a peaceful day, at the very least and so does your mother.

            I saw today that they had kicked off on the Temple Mount, yet again, evil bunch. Al-Aqsa should be razed. You know and I know why it is there. But then I think they should be removed from the entirety of Judea and Samaria. It is the only way that Israel will be able to live normally. Otherwise this rubbish is going to go on into the 22nd Century.

            I get two Easters. This Sunday I have two glorious chocolate Easter eggs to get sick with. But then, being Orthodox, I also get to celebrate on the 24th. There are advantages to being out of the religious mainstream!

          3. Jonathan sorry to learn that your wife has passed away, I expect she fed you well & not just at Passover!
            I hope that you will not be dipping your chocolate Easter eggs in Chrain ( horseradish & beetroot sauce ) best to eat in with Gefilte fish balls !

          4. Just looked up Chrain. Sounds as if it would go well with ox-cheek, one of our favourites.

      1. Hello Citroen1 thank you my friend wishing you & family a Happy Good Friday & Happy Easter, I just dropped in to wish all Nottlers a Happy Easter, you will will find me every day on my blogs & in particular the Coconut Whisperer one posting as the Coconut Whisperer & on my the Sputniks Orbit science blog ( & other blogs ) posting as Sputnik One ( the links are on my profile )

    3. Shalom Hat, have a happy Passover and hope you are with lots of family and friends.

    4. Pud, lovely that you’re here my dear! What a lovely surprise! You are greatly missed, you know…

      חג פסח שמח to you and yours.

      Don’t worry about the Rwandans – they’ll be well paid.

      1. Thank You my dear Hertslass , you and family have a great & safe Easter ! I do worry about the poor Rwandans, its bad enough they have hunger, poverty & a corrupt government without an influx of homicidal & rapist Islamists whose only skills are related to using AK47’s & suicide belts

        1. I think the Rwandans will be allowed to take things into their own hands much more than we are allowed to. The Sikhs tried over the rapings of their young girls here, and THEY were the ones plod went for. Plus, the immigrants can be kept an eye on without being able to complain that their 4* accommodation is inadequate.

          The most important thing for me, unfortunately, is that THEY WON’T BE HERE.

        2. I think the Rwandans will be allowed to take things into their own hands much more than we are allowed to. The Sikhs tried over the rapings of their young girls here, and THEY were the ones plod went for. Plus, the immigrants can be kept an eye on without being able to complain that their 4* accommodation is inadequate.

          The most important thing for me, unfortunately, is that THEY WON’T BE HERE.

    5. Good to see you, Hat. Hope you get a happy and peaceful Passover, and that only good things happen to you and yours.

        1. I tend to start on the oldest to avoid posting to articles that have been posted by someone else earlier.

          Either way, many thanks and celebrate Passover in a fitting manner.

        1. Thank you. Sun is shining and i have just been invited to a July wedding ! Their engagement has lasted 30 years !

          2. Had a knock today on my front door………………I said….’Not me Guv’…Seems to have more truth nowadays given they have lowered the limit.

    11. Hallo E & S – good to see you back with us – hope all’s well with you and yours and Happy Passover to you.

  48. The country (well, the MSM and the Labour Party certainly) will implode if any government dares to leave the EHCR – but then, it might implode under the weight of all immigration.

    Too often now I have the most appalling thought – that the crisis will only be solved by a terrible act of barbarism by immigrants, legal or illegal, that no government can ignore. We shouldn’t have to postulate the idea that hundreds or even thousands might die in order that millions might live safely.

    Such a beautiful sunny day should not be one to be having such bleak thoughts…

    Until Brexit is complete, Britain will never solve its Channel crisis

    Only when we leave the European Convention on Human Rights will we defeat people traffickers and their cruel trade

    NIGEL FARAGE

    The escalation of the Channel crisis over the last two years has prompted ever more dramatic statements from the Home Secretary, Priti Patel. From sending in the RAF to introducing life sentences for people traffickers, the rhetoric since 2020 has risen in line with the number of people arriving in Britain illegally. The announcement today of establishing a processing centre in Rwanda at an initial cost of £120 million, together with a large holding camp in North Yorkshire, is the most noteworthy yet.

    Just how big a problem is illegal immigration? The numbers speak for themselves. Yesterday alone, more than 600 people arrived in small boats, pushing the total this year over the 5,000 mark. These are just the official figures, of course, but they are running at three times the 2021 rate. The boats being launched from France are bigger, carrying an average of 40 people as opposed to just 20 or fewer before. Nine out of 10 arrivals are male and they are usually young.

    Why are people coming? Quite simply because the so-called “pull factors” of the United Kingdom are seen as greater than ever, making Britain seem far more attractive to immigrants than France. Indeed, these days the prospect of four-star hotel accommodation and almost zero chance of deportation are used as a marketing strategy by the traffickers.

    Some 28,500 people arrived in Britain via small boats last year, and the impact of this is being seen and felt by millions of people across the country. It is not unusual for me to receive emails from people who have had to change their wedding plans because the hotel where they had intended to hold their reception has – at taxpayers’ expense – been filled with undocumented young men who have arrived in Britain illegally. Concerns are running high in such areas about these young men loitering on high streets. And British citizens whose dream of moving into a council house has been derailed by the longer waiting lists caused by illegal immigrants are angry.

    On current trends, up to 75,000 more people will arrive here this year. Make no mistake: for those in Red Wall seats, who backed Brexit chiefly because they wanted the government to be able to control the borders, illegal immigration is the number one political issue. With three weeks until the local elections and the Labour Party taking a consistent lead in the polls, the government has been forced to act, hence the Rwanda option.

    Will this new tactic work? If Rwanda-bound flights do start to leave Lydd Airport in Kent, and a couple of thousand young men are sent there to be processed (or indeed paid to stay in that country) it will certainly have a short-term impact. After all, why would anyone pay a criminal trafficker up to €5,000 to come to Britain if they know there is a risk they won’t be allowed to stay here but will instead be flown to Africa? Any tangible drop in the numbers coming would give the government a significant political victory. I fear, however, that this potential success will not be long-lasting.

    First, there’s the cost. The government has been careful to use the figure of £120 million today. On the fact of it, this may seem reasonable. But anyone can see that with thousands of illegal immigrants to be processed, flights to be funded, plus myriad medical and other costs to be met, that figure will increase substantially and soon tip over into a much more substantial figure – all at a time when taxes are high and the cost of living is going through the roof.

    Another difficulty is the hostility to the idea itself. Twenty years ago, when the Australian government faced a similar crisis because of boats crossing from Indonesia into their country, an offshore processing centre was set up. The policy became known as the Pacific Solution. However, it wasn’t long before terrible tales of abuse and exploitation emerged in the Australian press. The situation spiralled rapidly into an international scandal. Australia ended up in the unenviable position of being condemned by the United Nations and the European Union. Some of the centres had to be closed down.

    The choice of Rwanda is interesting, and I can only assume that no other country was prepared to do this deal. Rwanda is a country with a poor human rights record that has just recently been under investigation by the UN. I find it difficult to believe that within a month or two we will not hear negative stories on a par with Australia’s experience. At the first sign of abuse in one of these processing centres, the human rights lawyers in London would be rubbing their hands with glee and would almost certainly be able to use the Human Rights Act in court to prevent further flights heading to Rwanda.

    So while I do have to give half a cheer to Priti Patel and the government for trying to confront this issue, I feel the entire media debate around today’s announcement ignores the elephant in the room – the Human Rights Act.

    Britain is still a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights; still subject to the court in Strasbourg; and European human rights law is still fully incorporated into UK law. This is why, over the last 20 years, successive governments have found it so difficult to deport foreign terrorists, rapists and murderers. Just last week we learned of an Afghan torturer – whose name we are not allowed to know but who is apparently 42 years old – who cannot be sent back to his country of origin because of this legislation. Why not? Because, it was claimed, if he were sent back to Afghanistan he might be tortured. The Home Office decided to grant him limited leave to remain under the European Convention on Human Rights.

    If a known torturer is allowed to stay in Britain thanks to this European legislation, there is no way our government will win court cases over undocumented men who can prove their treatment in Rwanda has for some reason been harsh or – in the eyes of the law – illegal.

    The heart of the problem is that Brexit has not been fully completed. As Boris Johnson knows very well, it will not be completed until Britain leaves the European Convention. Then, and only then, will Britain be able to solve the Channel crisis and return people to France. Undoing this legislation will not be popular among the liberal elites of London, but it certainly would be applauded in the Red Wall. Indeed, removing Britain from the European Convention may well be the way the Conservatives win the next general election. There is no other solution to tackling the Channel crisis that I can see that could possibly work.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2022/04/14/brexit-complete-britain-will-never-solve-channel-crisis/

    1. That is right – in every sense. But will the politicos listen? No – because there are too many dumbed-down twits and too many foreigners with a vote in the GE for them to care.

    2. The Rwanda proposal is impractical, hugely expensive – and a civil rights lawyers goldmine.

      A much simpler and less costly solution would be instantaneous transfer of all IRB illegal immigrants to redundant cruise liners.

      These should be khaki-painted, anchored north of the Needles and managed by experienced prison governors

      1. Wordle 300 X/6

        ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩
        ⬜🟨⬜⬜🟩
        🟨⬜⬜⬜🟩
        🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩
        🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩
        🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩
        My first fail today. Four words all similar but with a different fourth letter. I chose the wrong three! D’oh!

    2. Wordle 300 4/6

      🟨⬜⬜🟨🟩
      🟩⬜🟩⬜🟩
      🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

        1. I’ve tried to share but can’t get further than that screen. It then says copied results to clipboard and I have no idea where that is! I’m using an iPad so whether that makes any difference I have no idea.

          1. When it says “copy results to clipboard”, all you have to do is press Microsoft and ‘V’ – your clipboard will appear. If you click on it, it will appear in your message box.

            Simples!

          2. Don’t have Microsoft on my iPad Lacoste.

            From friggin’ genius to numbskull in one easy move!

    4. Wakey wakey, did it in 2 – (somewhere below)! I don’t have much to shout about, so when I have…

        1. Middle class students every need provided by helicopter parents…I will happily throw a punch. The response from such creatures like Jack Whitehall (the supposed comedian) would be ………….why would you do this? The answer being is ‘We have to actually work for a living.’ Being friends with the ginger Prince doesn’t pay our Bills !

        2. Giving them free bungee lessons using recycled frayed hemp cords tied around their necks to ensure that they can be lifted out of the water in a day or so ! The other form of tossing would qualify them as MP’s as the HoC has the UK’s greatest collection of Tossers all in one place !

    3. No one will do anything. The police stand and watch. The Government doesn’t give a shit about it.

      1. I’m becoming less sure about that.
        I can see some irate drivers taking clubs to them; the sheer number of these protests mean the police can’t protect them all.

          1. There is never a grassy knoll or a book depository window with a trained marksman armed with a 6.5×52mm Mannlicher–Carcano around when you need one!

          2. If the protestors start to get arrested and detained for a significant period of time we might see some movement. A few 4 figure fines would be a start.

          3. As posted by Grizz yesterday, the law sets the fine for obstructing the highway at up to £50.

          4. In the unlikely event it’s me at the front of a queue and for example HG misses her mother’s funeral I will go down the entire row punching or kicking each of the bastards in the face until I’m stopped. I reckon I can hit at least ten before anyone actually reacts.

            I’m guessing many people feel similarly

          5. But WE would be the ones that our disgusting plod would haul in. Our police are,(with few exceptions) unachieving, uneduated, bullying little b*st*rds and b*tches, who couldn’t get another job anywhere else.

            P.S. I speak from experience.

          6. But WE would be the ones that our disgusting plod would haul in. Our police are,(with few exceptions) unachieving, uneduated, bullying little b*st*rds and b*tches, who couldn’t get another job anywhere else.

            P.S. I speak from experience.

      2. Worse, the state endorses it. It’s fully wedded to the Left wing, big state, high tax, demented green twaddle. As far as it’s concerned, they’re doing nothing wrong.

    4. Sadly, it will be the poor sods trying to get to work/hospital/school etc…. You know, the law-abiding trying to earn a crust.

  53. I hope everyone has an enjoyable Easter and, at least for a while, ignore all the vicissitudes of life that has been our lot for so many months.
    I have a bottle of Yellow Tail Merlot (never had before so unknown) and a couple of Lp’s (remember those black discs 🙂) by Arvo Pärt, waiting until I can safely sit without anything else that needs doing

      1. I think you’ve mentioned it before, which is why when I saw a bottle, I thought ha!!

          11. Tesco recently had Kanga Shiraz at £6, with 25% off six or more bottles. Now Sainsburys are offering the same. I feel a shopping order coming on…

          12. Funny, I thought about going to Sainsbury’s tomorrow. Definitely on now. They stock plum tomatoes too which MH loves.
            Thanks Little Bro for the info 😉

      2. It’s a shame that they don’t/can’t do as they do in Australia, selling what they call “clean skins”.
        The bottles are merely labelled with what the wine is and sold very cheaply. It’s slightly pot luck, but we’ve never had a poor one and have enjoyed some outstandingly good ones for very little money.

        1. I have a few bottles of wine from the Chateau Musar vineyard in the Beqaa Valley.
          The are made with old style (traditional) methods, so some can be exceptional, while others need to be ingnored for a few years and then opened.

          1. I’ve had a number of ME wines, many superb, but when they are dire, they really are dire

        1. That’s really quite good compared with many of your sour offerings.

          “Always look on the bright side of life”

      4. We like their Merlot too. Tried a Pinot Grigio last week and it was really disappointing. Won’t be buying that again. It was really thin.

        1. Alf mentioned that. I haven’t had any issues with it. Everyone’s tastes are different.

    2. I found out my vinyl 33s of the Messiah last night along with the score. I haven’t tried switching on the record player yet, though, in case it goes “pop!”

      1. Depends how old it is; less than 10 years and it probably has a ‘switch mode power supply’ so no big capacitors that dry out and go bang.
        If just talking about a turntable, your biggest worry would be the stylus compliance damping going hard and giving terrible replay.

  54. That’s me gone. Still under par. Just have to keep taking the tablets. Maddening thing is that I have no interest in alcohol – which might, otherwise have made things less unbearable. At least the sun shone. The wisteria is almost out – as is the yellow Banksia rose. And there are 3 asparagus tipd showing…

    Have a jolly evening.

    I may be around tomorrow. Who knows? Who cares?

    5. Who knows who cares? Who cares who knows? Who knows who cares who knows? Who cares who knows who cares? … Etc etc ad nauseam ad infinitum ad astra…

  55. Bought some cheap plastic shelving. Intended to put all the crap that’s accumulated and do a sort out.

    It’s cheap, it’s truly nasty. Bit annoying as after having cabinets and storage for these things to suddenly find that I need more is annoying. But, it’s in, and next job is to consolidate what I don’t need and get that into storage.

    It’s looing as if at least two upstairs rooms need an entirely new subfloor – the wooden lattice thing.

    As, likely, will the kitchen. Ho hum.

    1. When are you going to post a photograph of you and the warqueen in all your Easter Ball finery? We can’t wait forever

      1. Cripes no. We head off at 7. She’s been ‘getting ready’ since about 4. Mostly I think that’s ‘Dear almighty sky person, please don’t let him speak.’

        Although I really want a nap.

      2. Cripes no. We head off at 7. She’s been ‘getting ready’ since about 4. Mostly I think that’s ‘Dear almighty sky person, please don’t let him speak.’

        Although I really want a nap.

    5. It used to be entertaining, but has become too left-wing and woke. Or perhaps it has been me who has changed?

    7. Plum wishing you and family a happy & safe Easter ! Is that the current Labour front bench team? No it can’t be,far too intelligent looking & too white!

    8. Nah mate. Haven’t watched it in years. Ian Hislop used to be amusing sometimes but he’s been insufferable for a long time

      2. TATTOOS
        Next time Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil demonstrators glue themselves to the road it would be lovely if teams of 2 to 4 folk could tattoo TWAT (or worse) on the foreheads of some of these antisocial idiots. You’d need a couple to hold one of them still while the other does a quick job. Battery operated tattoo pens are available on the Internet, as are balaclavas and ski masks to hide the identity of the tattooists. Wouldn’t it be luvverly!

    1. The Standard is a rag.
      The title tries to connect the damage to the ship with the attack on the factory.
      The journalist makes clear that the attack on the factory answers missile attacks on Russian villages. But it would not do to trumpet in a title that the Ukrainians are targetting civilians – that might suggest they are trying to provoke the Russians to do the same so that Zelensky can show us a few dead children.

      Whatever damaged the ship the two incidents are unrelated.

        1. Maybe it was hit by a missile, maybe it was not properly maintained and caught fire.
          There is no way for us to know with the counter-information black out.

          2. My point was that the Standard title is making a link which is not supported by the article, and detracts from what the Ukrainians are actually doing and which is reported in the article.

          3. I couldn’t care less about what any interpretation any news outlet puts on the sinking. The fact is, it did. Russia denied it (at first). Who do you believe? Both sides are lying.

          4. I do believe that the Ukrainians are trying to provoke an attack on their own civilians. That is what the article implies, and that is far more important than the question as to what the Russian are admitting.

            I don’t have the information to commit to a belief as to the ship.

            But I reckon saying it was an accident makes them look worse than saying it was shot at, so that is more likely, in my opinion. Otherwise they would use it as an excuse to escalate military actions in the South where whatever unit is supposed to have shot the ship would be based.

          5. Then the Russians are incompetent, and not to be trusted. Either way, they lose – which is what I have already said. I do not trust the Russians or the Ukrainians. I have no sympathy for either.

          6. Ships catch fire depressingly often. Add the Russians, and you get a recipe for mayhem.

    2. The Standard is a rag.
      The title tries to connect the damage to the ship with the attack on the factory.
      The journalist makes clear that the attack on the factory answers missile attacks on Russian villages. But it would not do to trumpet in a title that the Ukrainians are targetting civilians – that might suggest they are trying to provoke the Russians to do the same so that Zelensky can show us a few dead children.

      Whatever damaged the ship the two incidents are unrelated.

    3. The Standard is a rag.
      The title tries to connect the damage to the ship with the attack on the factory.
      The journalist makes clear that the attack on the factory answers missile attacks on Russian villages. But it would not do to trumpet in a title that the Ukrainians are targetting civilians – that might suggest they are trying to provoke the Russians to do the same so that Zelensky can show us a few dead children.

      Whatever damaged the ship the two incidents are unrelated.

    4. The Standard is a rag.
      The title tries to connect the damage to the ship with the attack on the factory.
      The journalist makes clear that the attack on the factory answers missile attacks on Russian villages. But it would not do to trumpet in a title that the Ukrainians are targetting civilians – that might suggest they are trying to provoke the Russians to do the same so that Zelensky can show us a few dead children.

      Whatever damaged the ship the two incidents are unrelated.

    5. RT say the fire caused an ammunition store to explode. They also say that the crew were evacuated, which is more important.

      1. I don’t believe the Russians. I don’t believe the Ukrainians. Apparently, questioning the Russian explanation of anything is verboten on this message board. I am close to leaving.

        1. There are issues we don’t all agree on but it should never be an echo chamber. Don’t go.

        2. Truth is the first casualty of war. I don’t believe the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Western MSM or any of our politicians. There is no doubt that PooTin in an evil bar steward, but – since 2014 – Ukraine has been shelling the bejasus out of it’s Russian speaking countrymen in the Donbas. I don’t condone either. There are no goodies and baddies in this conflict. Just the latter.

          1. Thanks, Geoff. This board is in danger of becoming a pro-Putin echo chamber. It’s the lack of balance (which ironically seems in the MSM to be pro-Ukraine) which I object to. When a message board ceases to be an arena for debate is when the danger occurs.

          2. You would hope that a conservative group would be more open to reason than the woke lefty crowd pushing some climate change / emergency cause but that hasn’t been the case for several years.

            Just dare to suggest that anything Boris says is sensible!

          3. Richard, nothing Alexander Boris de Pffefel Johnson says is sensible. And certainly not conservative (deliberately uncapitalised). Mea maxima culpa. I voted for him as leader, and in the GE. But I still believe that J Hunt would have been worse. There are no local elections here next month. Come 2024, should I still be alive (DV), am I likely to walk to the nearest polling station, 1.5 miles away, and back? It seems highly unlikely. In the unlikely event that Messrs Tice and Farage ge their act together, I’ll go for a postal vote.

          5. My take on this is that Brexit was divisive, Covid was more divisive still, and now, Ukraine is the worst of the lot. I feel we’re being played. For all his faults, Putin seems to have cured Covid. Or, at least, he’s nudged it from the headlines.

            We’ve endured more than two years of bullshit re. the ‘deadly plague’. That closely followed Orange Man Bad and Brexit (the latter of which the elites fell over themselves to discredit and reverse). Of the four Horsemen, we switched overnight from Pestilence to War. In fact the Speccie published a cartoon saying as much:

            https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltf04078f3cf7a9c30/bltd6881c910146d55e/621f68d51aa0b67c03a286c9/wilbur_050322_2_sg.jpg?format=jpg&width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds
            ‘Pestilence, take a well-earned break. War, you’re up.’

            The next Horseman is Famine. I wonder how that could possibly relate to the situation in Ukraine?

            I am determined that this forum will not be an echo chamber. I want to hear all sorts of views, right or left wrong. Don’t go.

          8. Sometimes. But for the last six years, I’ve encouraged debate here. Elsewhere it appears to be fashionable ‘below the line’ to call anyone one disagrees with, “Vladimir”. It’s not big, and it’s definitely not clever,.

          9. You know me- there will always be a counter opinion. If my computer survives- it is really playing silly buggers. Grrr.

          11. Agreed – and, Geoff, I think you may find a lot of like-minded people herein. My take:

            Boris and Carrie, taking orders from the WEF, are working to undermine the UK with their Net-Zero Policies
            There is a great need for the UK to leave the ECHR and repeal the Human Rights Act
            We need to start backing Russia against Ukraine and recognise who is the agressor.
            About time we left NATO, it’s become too left wing and delighting in starting war.
            Kick out the illegals and those who rode in on the back of it.
            Kick out the Muslims – they’re only here to undermine us..

          13. I agree with much of that, Tom. As for Russia and Ukraine – while I feel the pain of those who have been bombed out of existence or worse, I find it difficult to take sides. Among their politicians, I’d like both sides to lose. Don’t know whether PooTin is for or against the WEF. Hardly matters: the WEF is our greatest enemy. It may be more subtle than Putin…

          14. I think China is our greatest enemy and is biding its time while the rest of the world destroys itself. Are they part of the orchestration?

          15. Perhaps it’s a reaction to the constant pro-Ukraine stuff that’s poured out endlessly. A sort of push-back?

          16. I’m with you- I don’t believe a word I hear or read about anything these days. All we are fed are lies and propaganda- it’s nauseating.
            This last two years seems to have been a staged plot to screw the entire world up.
            Sod ’em all.

        3. There are some things where one version rings a lot more true than another. In the case of this ship, both sides’ versions sound equally like propaganda.
          I suspect the truth may be that the Americans sank it, as I really can’t see Ukraine managing that on their own.

        4. #metoo. I’ve been fed up with Minty’s preachy crap for many a year and that other Russian Californian’s crap who asserts that we ought to believe whatever he says because he’s a long-time Orthodox. My God he’s bogus and I loathe every aspect of his propaganda. God I hate him, in part because one of my very best friends, now dead, was the daughter of a Russian Princess who would have blown every aspect of that little turd’s assertions out of the water.

  58. I’ve just watched the headline news.

    Zelensky is deliberately provoking Russia in every way possible to get them to over-react. (yes I know, the Russian invasion was wrong) and hoping that the “West” joins in.

    He doesn’t care a flying fuck for his own people, just his personal image.

      1. … in the West.
        But as we are not allowed to view whatever the rest of the world can see, that does not mean much.

          1. The West is behaving like the Soviet Union – try finding Russia today or Sputnic on Youtube. They are suppressed in the West.

            Putin is an authoritarian, I expect him to behave like one, but quite frankly when it came to lockdowns and vaccines he showed more respect for the Russian population than the Western managers (it is too much to call them leaders).

          3. Interesting – I just tried Sputnik and it is a spoof site on Google and both Sputnik and RT are banned on YT which is where most people would view most of their news.

            Also view:

            https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-60791734

            https://www.vulture.com/2022/03/youtube-tiktok-meta-block-russia-owned-rt.html

            https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/03/08/eu-officials-defend-move-to-ban-rt-and-sputnik-amid-censorship-claims

            So yes, Western media are suppressing RT and Sputnik – that they Google have not entirely banned it is something I suppose.

            But thanks for the RT link.

      2. Indeed.
        But when he’s forced to surrender, (assuming the West doesn’t join in) the truth will come out.

        1. If he loses, he wins. If he wins, he wins. The plucky underdog always has the sympathy of others.

          1. Shame for his country and his people, but hey ho, what’s a destroyed country in the great scheme of a theatrical career.
            Next job, Sec Gen of the UN perhaps…

    2. He’s doing what his bosses are telling him.
      Interested that he was implicated in the Panama papers. He is like Biden, just another mediocrat.

        2. Yes. This situation is very worrying.
          I cannot help but wonder what benefit is being sought other than massive depopulation by war and famine… and who considers that to be a benefit.

    3. I wouldn’t say that, I feel he is cleverly using psychology on Vlad the Impaler & the Ruskies to provoke them into hasty moves that are not pre-planned & will not work out well for them both on the battlefield & in the propaganda battle which is as just an important weapon of war as any. In Algeria the French won the War on the ground but lost it back in Paris , ditto for the US in Vietnam, they won on the battlefield but lost it back in the USA . In both cases the media was against their own countries military & poisoned the atmosphere back home. Vlad may control the Russian media but has no control of the media abroad & has lost the war !

      1. I agree on many aspects of your post, but disagree on this particular part: Vlad hasn’t lost, unless Zelensky can kick start WW3 and my view is that he would be very happy for that to happen.

        1. WW3 started the day WW2 ended, by then the Communists had their people embedded in every Western nation controlling every aspect of education, the law, the media, the unions, religion & all political parties from left to right

    4. Maybe, I don’t know anymore. Just told an ex-navy lady officer widow who was organising a raffle at the pub for the Ukraine that I wouldn’t contribute. Gave my reasons as being I don’t know WTF is really happening out there. Her deceased hubby, also a naval officer, would have been more suspicious than she is, but I can’t be certain as he died 7 years ago.

      1. It’s the same one I’ve posted, just from a different site.
        As you say, worth chewing through.

        1. Thomas cooked such a delicious exciting dish … so clever . Just finished watching the prog.
          Wishing him luck.. he certainly is very talented.

        2. I do like Malaysian grub, despite the fact that my mum was born in British North Borneo and was the worst cook in the world.

          1. My short term memory is not good but Thomas was the first Oriental i had ever met. The curry was good.

  60. That’s me for a while, off to watch the demise of an earlier lot of old dinosaurs.

      1. Millyons, millyons, you know it makes sense, let’s leave the billyons to the squires.

    1. Good to hear from you, Pud.
      At the risk of sounding Jim in Friday Night Dinner ….. “Shalommmmmm ….. shalommmmm…..”

  62. Like a lamb to the slaughter, Wibbers is off to his Easter frolic. Why can I hear the Dead March from Saul in my head?

      2. Selling England by the Pound would be a Nursery Cryme for a Foxtrot with A Trick of the Tail.

        1. Yes, digesting England by the pound.
          Then again, I’m identifying as a Lawn mower – you can tell me by the way I walk.

        2. Yes, digesting England by the pound.
          Then again, I’m identifying as a Lawn mower – you can tell me by the way I walk.

  63. Watching Patrick Christys on GB News. His challenge today was Goat Yoga…. I laughed so hard. Goats are fun animals.

        2. Goats just go all doe eyed and beg for food. Octicats just look at you, decide you maybe hostile and go through multiple colour changes and if really pissed off, squirt ink.

      1. Never eaten goat and don’t want to. One day I will tell some true goat tales…clean ones.

          2. Goats cheese is good. A lot of goats milk in the Middle East. Goats can live on the tufts of grass that poke out of the rocks? There’s a shortage of good pasture for cows, except in Israel.

  66. The two faced hypocrisy of it:-

    Blair wants asylum-seeker camp in Africa
    Andrew Grice
    Thursday 26 February 2004 01:00

    The Government was accused yesterday of starting “an international trade in displaced people” after Tony Blair confirmed plans to process people seeking asylum in Britain near their country of origin.

    Downing Street denied a “cash for people” deal under which asylum-seekers would be dumped on some of the world’s poorest countries. But Britain has offered Tanzania an extra £4m in aid if it opens an asylum….

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/blair-wants-asylumseeker-camp-in-africa-71062.html

      1. Speaking as an anti-monarchist – Harry and William had the overwhelming sympathy of the British public when their mother died. Harry has lost it all. I wonder why?

      2. Many a good man has been brought low by a bad woman just as many good girls have been ruined by bad men.

  70. Evening, all. Happy Good Friday to you (what’s left of it). I’ve had a productive and calm day; I discovered that an occasional table (sometimes it thinks it’s a chair ) I fancied had been reduced to nearly half price in a sale, so I bought it, then I went to my local gardens to chill out and enjoy the sunshine in peace and quiet (despite it being a Bank Holiday). Oscar was so chilled, he stretched out on the grass when I sat down to bask in the sun and went to sleep. I had to wake him up to go! He was so chilled he didn’t do his usual “how dare you disturb my rest?” antics, but just got up and went! We called in at church for the service of The Last Hour on the way home and he settled down and went to sleep again. He didn’t even bother to give the choir a note this time 🙂 He did, however, snore slightly, which was a bit embarrassing in the silent bits 🙂 Could have been worse; he can snore for England when he really gets going! Now I have “He was despised” and “With his stripes we are healed” as an ear worm. As to the headline, frankly we just don’t need ANY more people from anywhere; the Ukrainians have the whole of Europe to choose from and the gimmigrants from Africa have their own continent to live in. We are FULL.

    1. You made me laugh! The picture of Oscar snoring in church really amused me. Maybe if the music had been The Trumpets Shall Sound, his snoring wouldn’t have been noticed.

      1. Made me laugh, too, but I had to stifle it. Bad enough his snoring, but me laughing would have been really beyond the pale! I did put in a word for you and YOH, though.

          1. Will do when he wakes up. He’s been okay twice today when woken up, but it may not be third time lucky, so I don’t want to push it! I can’t believe he’s got over sleep startle so suddenly.

          2. Maybe it has sunk in that he’s onto a good thing? Dogs aren’t daft and soon realise where their best interests lie. My first dog, Toby, snored like a warthog.

          3. I don’t know. I think he’s very slow on the uptake. I used to think my Patterdale cross was thick, but Oscar makes him look like a genius 🙁

    2. Yo, Conners. I recall sitting at a battery-powered keyboard at the top of Brandon High Street, while the ecumenical Walk of Witness took place. Somehow, the cries of “Happy Easter!” seemed out of place. Then off to St Mary, Mildenhall – a wonderful Suffolk church which had been taken over by the ‘evangelicals’.

      I played for the last hour of a 3 hour service. I think they ran out of Passiontide / Good Friday hymns after two hours. Hence, I found myself playing “Low in the grave He lay”. Fairy nuff, but the refrain goes “Up from the grave he arose; with a mighty triumph o’er his foes; he arose a victor from the dark domain, and he lives forever, with his saints to reign. He arose! He arose! Hallelujah! Christ arose!”

      Utterly inappropriate for Good Friday. Why bother going to Church on Easter Sunday, if Christ has already arisen? In the end, I drove straight to St Edmundsbury Cathedral for Choral Evensong, purely to restore some sort of equilibrium.

      Grrr. Happy Easter, anyway, and here’s a photo of Dianne’s Grand-dog (She stayed at her daughter’s last night, and Maddie the Schnauzer found the guest bed).

      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/98d1594baf970da5dfdf8807228cf5b997ec45542e453e7837a5c696c9b880f5.png

      1. That is one contented pooch! Oscar can’t quite bring himself to lie on his back like that yet (he still feels too vulnerable), but he does lie on his side with his legs out straight.

          1. Oscar was creating outside in the garden while I was stoking the Rayburn just now, so when I’d finished I went out to see what the problem was. There was a (very large) hedgehog on the path – but not the reason for the racket. Oscar had his back to it, yelling and shouting in the opposite direction at nothing! He definitely wasn’t giving a hedgehog bark.

  71. Goodnight Y’all and sweet dreams. Worn out again but we had a nice quiet day. And I didn’t whinge;-))
    Wine run tomorrow following Geoff’s instructions;-)
    Be well everyone.

  72. I know there aren’t many of you up this late who are in the mood to read long articles and I don’t want to spoil what’s left of your evening but here’s another example of warped feminist ideology, one that is endangering life. Allison Pearson has written more than once on this subject, especially in reference to the Telford scandal. She made the observation in an earlier article that there was a time when the use of epidurals and drug-induction in maternity units was in itself causing concern. The reaction to this was to treat women as whales and throw them in the birthing pools. So natural, that…

    My mother belonged to that post-war generation of women who had so few opportunities to contribute to society other than to be mothers that they went into nursing, and a formidable crew they were. Had any of these natural birth fanatics shown up in their hospitals they’d have bodily thrown them off the premises.

    Our world is sick.

    This cult of the ‘normal’ birth is dangerous

    Your emails on the Ockenden report offer a harrowing glimpse into maternity in this country – how is this still allowed to happen?

    ALLISON PEARSON

    Will they never learn? I felt slightly sick when I saw an advert placed last week by the Northumbria Healthcare Foundation Trust on the NHS Jobs website. “We are seeking a highly motivated midwife […] who is committed to the philosophy of normal birth,” the ad read. The successful applicant will work for the Tyne Valley Bright Horizons midwifery service to “deliver the Better Births vision”. According to the trust, teams “are staffed by passionate, normality-focused midwives who provide a friendly birth experience within a low-risk setting offering water birth and active birth”.

    Do you think anyone in the Northumbria Healthcare Foundation Trust bothered to read the excoriating report by Donna Ockenden into the scandal at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust? More than 200 babies and nine mothers died there, in no small part because of a fixation with the “philosophy of normal birth”.

    After writing about the Ockenden report, I received a blizzard of emails from mums, grandmothers, dads, grandfathers, hospital consultants and bitterly disenchanted midwives. Devastating doesn’t begin to cover it. I cannot remember being so shaken and upset by a response from readers.

    There is a lot to say, but if I have one piece of wisdom to share from all your incredible correspondence it is this: contrary to that ad placed by the Northumbria Healthcare Trust, there is no such thing as a “low-risk setting”. As one Telegraph reader commented: “Of all the medical specialties, obstetrics can be the most harrowing. Every birth has the potential to turn rapidly into a crisis.” You’d better have a doctor standing by to get the baby out sharpish.

    Most parents-to-be would assume that was the case. They’d be wrong.

    To my amazement and horror, I have just found out that an obstetrician may barely be in the same postal district as a birth going wrong, let alone in the same hospital. In a “midwife-led delivery unit” (MLUs), a stand-alone facility established in the early-Nineties because midwives resented medical oversight by largely male obstetricians, it is not required to have an obstetrician on site. In hospitals, meanwhile, midwife-driven care tends to put off the alleged evil of a C-section until the last possible moment; often, when it’s far too late.

    It was telling how many grandmothers wrote to me, contrasting their own labours more than 30 years ago on efficient, consultant-led wards, with the distress, danger and lack of continuity experienced by their daughters under midwife care. At the Royal Berkshire Hospital, Sheila’s grandson was unable to come out because he had the cord around his neck and it was too short to allow him to be born. “The midwife told us that it was going according to plan,” Sheila recalls.

    “My grandson’s life was saved because a senior nurse put her head around the door to say she had just come on duty. To her inquiry, ‘How is it going?’, my farmer son-in-law replied: ‘If this was a lambing, I would say it is going very badly indeed.’

    “His comment caused the staff nurse to call a doctor and my grandson was cut out, it being too late for a C-section. Blessedly, he suffered no harm, unlike another baby who was born in the same unit two weeks later and was severely brain damaged. I have often wondered if that poor woman had the same midwife as my daughter or just one with the same ideology. I will always be grateful that one staff nurse did not bow to the superior purpose of the midwife.”

    What purpose could possibly be superior to getting a baby out alive? You’d be surprised. The word “ideology” cropped up again and again in your descriptions of midwives. So did “chippy”, “defensive”, “cruel”, “famously aggressive”, “territorial” and “thick”. Yes, some midwives are wonderful, but as an ex-midwife who left because of bullying by senior colleagues told me: “The kind ones who really care always leave.”

    Just how qualified are the ones who stay? Midwives used to do a full nursing training before specialising in midwifery. No longer. “I’m sorry, but they simply don’t have the knowledge or the experience of critical care they once had,” complained one consultant, “and very often, they are too slow or too stubborn to admit that a labour isn’t progressing as it should and the foetus is distressed.”

    It’s not only baby that’s distressed. “Allison, do you remember that episode of All Creatures Great and Small when James Herriot helps a calf into the world by sticking an arm up inside a cow and pulling?” asked Lindy. That visceral, bloody scene, Lindy told me, was re-enacted when her grandson came belatedly into the world at the Princess Royal University Hospital in Orpington. After a labour of 37 hours (and overdue at 42 weeks’ pregnant), Lindy’s daughter Tanya had repeatedly asked midwives if she could have a Caesarean, and was told that she couldn’t, “and that she was talking too much”.

    “Even when it was clear that the baby was in distress, no plan was made for a C-section. The doctor was only called when the midwife Tanya had first seen on the Friday evening came back for the Saturday evening shift and was surprised to find her still there,” says Lindy. “Early on Sunday, Tanya was finally taken into surgery and a ventouse was used unsuccessfully. Eventually, the doctor pushed both arms up to the elbow inside Tanya and dragged Harry out. In the process, the baby was without oxygen to the brain for some period and did not breathe for five long minutes after he was born.”

    A lovely boy, clearly adored by his granny, Harry suffers from ADHD and autism and is obsessed with death. Tanya was left incontinent. Her mother says she was far too traumatised to make a complaint.

    There are many more stories like those. Too many. I am returning to this subject today because your emails have convinced me that pregnant women in the UK are at an unacceptably high risk. According to the latest figures, of the 193 NHS maternity services in England, 80 are rated as “inadequate” or “requires improvement”. That means 40 per cent do not meet basic safety standards. How is this allowed to happen in a first world country?

    Of course, lack of staff is a major issue (many midwives work a 12.5-hour shift). It has been since David Cameron committed to training 3,000 extra midwives before he came to power in 2010, describing them as “overworked and demoralised”. A year later, I asked him: “What happened to those 3,000 new midwives you promised us, prime minister?” Honestly, you have never seen a man blush like that. He was fuschia.

    Embarrassment was the correct reaction to a crisis about which there has never been enough honesty. Immigration caused a previously declining British birth rate to rocket. Midwives were also struggling to keep up with the added pressure caused by a growing number of older or obese pregnant women. In 2020, figures revealed that, for the first time, half of women had not had a baby by their 30th birthday. It is far easier to deliver a fit, young woman than an overweight older one. (The latter, who once included your columnist, are much more likely to need a C-section.)

    But you’re not allowed to say that. It’s ageist and fattist and insensitively commonsensist. So a 38-year-old elderly primigravida will drink deep of the hypnobirthing claptrap at the NCT antenatal classes and be encouraged by “normality-focused” midwives to pursue a “friendly birth” in a paddling pool when, chances are, the poor cow will end up just like me – with a large baby wedged in her vagina for many excruciating hours, followed by an emergency operation. If, that is, the midwives will permit some ghastly, overqualified male surgeon to dispel the magical birthing atmosphere with his butchery.

    I’m not kidding. The feminist insistence that midwives were “independent practitioners” in their own right, and that labour was best treated as a calm, harmonious woman-only activity, brought about the creation of MLUs where male medics were regarded as interlopers. “Even seeking an obstetric opinion might be seen as a failure for an independently-minded midwife,” says a bereaved father. Most hospital trusts (75 per cent) now have MLUs. You can see why NHS managers are delighted to encourage these natural birth centres when the absence of medical and operating-theatre staff makes them considerably less expensive to run than the previous model.

    But are they as safe? The evidence from Shrewsbury and Telford, and now Nottingham and East Kent, says no.

    I would go further. What amounts to a ban on men from caring for women in MLUs is putting babies at grave risk. It is both reckless and appallingly sexist. Not all obstetricians are male (the surgeon who fished my daughter out was a woman), obviously, but many are. Too often they are treated as the enemy. Last month, the NHS finally told NHS trusts that they must no longer use (low) C-section rates as a target. But will MLUs heed that guidance, or will midwives continue to regard surgical intervention as a failure in the natural order?

    A doctor whose wife nearly lost their first child because midwives persisted in trying to deliver a breech baby, long after it was clear he wasn’t coming out, tells me that the absence of resident consultant obstetricians on site is one of the secret scandals of the NHS. “The British Army places their senior surgeons right on the frontline of battle to receive the wounded and give them the best possible care,” he says. “We need our consultant obstetricians right there, in hospitals, as women come in the front door in labour.”

    Of course we do. Only a brainwashed midwife whose goal is to keep labouring mothers out of the hands of doctors could think otherwise.

    In her report, Donna Ockenden said: “Staff must be able to escalate concerns if necessary. There must be clear processes for ensuring that obstetric units are staffed by appropriately trained staff at all times. If not resident, there must be clear guidelines for when a consultant obstetrician must attend.”

    And which “passionate, normality-focused” midwife is going to call the consultant, eh? Shellshocked ex-midwives tell me you are looked down on if you wheel your mums down to the theatre for a timely C-section. I know of several MLUs which coerce or bribe pregnant women into having a “normal” birth by reserving the best facilities, where dads are allowed to stay overnight, for those who promise to forgo pain relief. It’s a cult.

    As I type this, somewhere in our country there is a woman trying to have a baby and they are not safe. They are not safe because midwives have decided that they know best so no doctor is nearby to come running if baby gets distressed. That’s why I’m typing this. Because recruiting midwives who believe in “the philosophy of normal birth” is dangerous. Cults are always dangerous. A better birth is a birth that produces a living baby. So I won’t stop typing, not after the stories you’ve sent me. Not until mothers and babies are safe.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2022/04/13/cult-normal-birth-exists-lives-mothers-babies-danger/

    1. Giving birth in Tidworth Military Hospital more than 50 years ago was pretty dire but things seem to have regressed since then.

    2. Another factor that the writer doesn’t mention is the reluctance of some muslim women to come into contact with strange men.
      Apart from the ideologies that Allison Pearson talks about, the main problem seems to be lack of experienced staff.
      Ideology usually gives way to pragmatism and the wisdom of experience.

      Natural birth doesn’t have to mean birthing pools, by the way. I had four natural births, and never went near a birthing pool. I was lucky that they were all straightforward. My mother (surgeon-led hospital in the 60s) wasn’t so lucky – she lost one baby due to a mistake by a doctor.
      In France, I had the choice between a consultant-led hospital and a midwife-led one. I chose the latter. The arrogant male surgeon and the unsympathetic hospital did put me off. In my time, I have met two creepy male gynecologists – this IS a factor.

      I think Allison Pearson is right to raise this important issue, but just abolishing midwife-led units won’t repair the damage done by a lack of experienced staff and an ideology-driven NHS.

      1. Birthing pools: I was editorialising a little – channelling my inner Rod Liddle as it were! They were the extreme reaction to concerns about the over-medicalisation of birth and were sent up a bit in the media when they first appeared.

        BTL there are plenty of comments to support the assertion that it’s not always a question of economics that means obstetricians are unavailable. With two others nurses in the extended family, tales of bull-headed midwives who think they can do it without assistance have been too common for too long. After all, isn’t the obstetrician supposed to assess the relative risk for an individual patient?

  75. Global media is humming with the news of the demise of the Russian warship Moskva which, according to some.reports, was just an unfortunate accidental fire that broke out after a naval rating stubbed out a Belomorkanal cigarette on a dodgy magazine.

    What is not likely to be discounted however is the recorded ship to shore communication contained in this video clip:

    https://youtu.be/0zeHwlcxX90

    1. That French journalist said that the Americans are controlling the Ukrainian response on the ground. I doubt the Ukrainians would have managed this on their own!

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