Friday 29 December:  Don’t let rewilding be an obstacle to progress in British food production

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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416 thoughts on “Friday 29 December:  Don’t let rewilding be an obstacle to progress in British food production”

  1. Good morrow, Gentlefolk. today’s story

    Doctor’s Orders
    A man went to see his doctor. He had a bad case of piles, causing him excruciating pain. The doctor gave him a case of suppositories. The doctor asked the man if he would like him to put the first one in for him. A little embarrassed, the man agreed. He bent over and held his breath. He felt a sharp pain, then the doctor said, “Right, you’re done. Insert the next one in about five hours. If you can’t manage it yourself, ask your wife to give you a hand.”
    The man went home and laid down to recover from the experience. About five hours later, he tried to put the suppository in himself, but he couldn’t get the angle quite right, so he asked his wife to help him. She told him to bend over, and put a hand on his shoulder to steady him. When she stuck it in him, he let out a scream. “Sorry! Did I hurt you? I was as gentle as I could be,” his wife said.
    “It’s not that,” he said. He stood up and looked at her. His face was as white as a ghost. His wife asked him, “What is it then?”
    He replied, “When the doctor did it for me, he had both his hands on my shoulders.”

    1. Indeed not and these could try ruling us for the next 4 years. Is this going to spark the revolution.

    2. I have formed the view that nobody but an Epsilon Semi-Moron viz. a total fucking idiot, would vote for any of the major mainstream parties.

      I have a notion that the next election will break the Uni-Party monopoly. I cannot truly believe that we British have lost all sense of our own well-being such as to vote for and submit to the present arseholes occupying our Parliament.

      2. Morning all.

        I think many will just not bother to vote because there’s no difference between them all. Hope Reform does well or if nobody representing them stands here I’ll vote for an Independent.

        1. For some time now, I have had no confidence in any of the parties, and consider them all a hindrance to democracy. I actually had a discussion with Shirley Williams in the ‘Social Democrat’ newspaper from the 1980s over whether there was too much or too little whippery in parliament. I argued that there was too much, since it was compromising the individual consciences of members beyond the point that was doing the country any good. She argued that there was too little discipline in parliament, and that things needed to be tightened up.

          I last voted for a party rather than a candidate in 2010, when I voted Green. In the 2015 and 2017 elections, I actually voted Labour for the first time in my life, because the candidates put up were, in my judgement, the best on offer regardless of party affiliation. 2015’s offering from Labour was a local small businessman with a social conscience and seemed to me precisely the sort of person that should be running the country. He is an Independent councillor today. In 2017, it was a district nurse, who seemed to have sound ideas about keeping the cottage hospitals open and functioning, but I went off her later when she took up “Safeguarding” which I consider profoundly threatening.

          In 2019, I did not like any of the parties on offer, nor felt any confidence in any of the candidates, so I spoilt my ballot paper in the hope that my message might get through in the microsecond they scrutinise my paper during the count.

          At the moment, the prospect is for a repeat of 2019, but I always hope that someone decent will step forward. The Tory incumbent MP, who has a huge majority, is a bear of little brain, and about as effective politically as Winnie the Pooh. She is therefore a Government minister unlikely to rock the boat much, although she did come out in favour of keeping the local FE college from becoming a housing development opportunity. Not that it stopped it closing; the local district council, controlled by Independents, seems to have given up trying to raise enough money to buy it to run as a community college. Most of the Council Tax goes to County (overwhelmingly Tory-run), which is utterly corrupt and does little of value for the lion’s share they take off the taxpayer – mostly extravagant traffic light systems, “Safeguarding” and gender and race compliance.

      3. The huge — insurmountable — problem is that an ever-increasing mass of morons who have been given the right to vote, will ensure a victory for the most clueless, least capable, and overwhelmingly most dangerous of those mainstream parties.

    3. I like the main theme of a complete shower standing in a shower.

      Second theme for me is that this bunch of dangerous 🤡🤡🤡 do not have the sense to take shelter from of the rain and wind: is that a pictorial metaphor for more of the same, or worse, politically, will be coming down the line?

  3. ‘Morning All

    Early Medley

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    1. Well, not exactly up….. more propped up in bed! The wind is getting up again out there and it’s starting to rain – yet again! Good morning Mir, and everyone!

  8. America is unprepared to fight a war on three fronts. 29 December 2023.

    The Western world’s material issues provide enough of a challenge. But our spiritual degradation may prove fatal. Many young people in Europe and America have been primed, sometimes from grade school, to follow the essentially anti-Western “oppressor” and “colonialist” narrative. A recent report from the Future of Democracy at the University of Cambridge, found support for democracy in the West falling most among 18–34-year-olds.

    The democratic world is sleepwalking towards disaster yet again. Just as we need them most, it’s nigh-on impossible to find anyone in the West who resembles Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman or even Nixon or Reagan. The EU bureaucracy certainly is no substitute for De Gaulle. The West cannot win, or even stay relevant, in the “clash of civilisations” if it does not believe in itself, and continues to neglect the physical means to protect its interests.

    The “democratic world”? Mr Kotkin means the West here but is deluding himself. It is no longer such. Ironically it has been destroyed by the people he is appealing to. Slaves and helots do not make good soldiers. For that you need free men.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2023/12/28/america-iran-houthi-antony-blinken-china-red-sea-shipping/

    1. “The omens [for the weather] are good, allegedly.” Well, today’s forecasts (no rain and no major bursts of wind) made it the perfect weather for the bin men to take away compostable rubbish, plus paper & cardboard, plus plastic rubbish. Yet, for some unknown reason, all the rubbish I put out for collection has not been touched and it’s now 7.30 pm and pitch black. Are you in the same boat, Korky? If so, does this mean that the local bin men are on strike too?

      1. Elsie, I did not have anything to put out this week, however, my neighbours did and it appears to have been collected – usual collection is Thursday here.
        I’m sure that the bin-men collect on Tuesday to Friday and as there was no collection on Tuesday (Boxing Day) your collection day will slip one day i.e. if your usual collection day is a Friday your rubbish should be collected Saturday.

  10. Putin sends revenge squads into Crimea after destruction of warship. 28 December 2023.

    “The flywheel of repression is spinning,” Atesh, a pro-Kyiv Crimean Tatar guerrilla group, said.

    It reported that Moscow-installed authorities had raided properties and confiscated residents’ smartphones as they searched for possible collaborators with the Ukrainian military in the recent missile attack on the vessel.

    “It is reported that Putin is completely furious over the destruction of the Novocherkassk large landing ship,” Atesh said.

    “An order was issued to punish the Crimean air defence forces. It is expected that many commanders will be removed and sent to the front to participate in assault groups,” the partisans added in a post on the Telegram messaging app.

    Did it ever occur to the writer of this piece to wonder how a “pro-Kyiv Crimean Tatar guerrilla group” would know what was happening in the Kremlin?

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/12/28/putin-sends-revenge-squads-crimea-after-destruction-warship/

      1. Good Morning Elsie

        A poor 5 today

        Wordle 923 5/6

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  12. Don’t let rewilding be an obstacle to progress in British food production

    No it wont affect insect farm production whatsoever

  13. Good morning, chums. A quick look at today’s posts, then back later with my Wordle results. Enjoy your day.

  14. We are so enriched…

    BTL@DTletters

    Steve E Jones
    6 HRS AGO
    Multiculturalism going well it appears:
    “Father-of-two killed when car ploughed into crowd in Sheffield was helping unconscious woman:

    Warren Sheehy
    4 HRS AGO
    Reply to Steve E Jones
    Indeed mate. The initial altercation rendering the woman unconscious started at the nearby mosque.

  15. Brendan O’Neill
    Where have the ‘anti-racists’ gone?
    28 December 2023, 3:10pm

    Where have all the anti-racists gone? You couldn’t move for anti-racists in recent years. They thundered from their newspaper pulpits about the evils of ‘white privilege’. They were in schools, universities, workplaces, re-educating the throng in racial correct-speak. They loudly wrung their hands over Brexit, and us dim gammon who voted for it, warning that leaving the EU would unleash a 1930s-style hate fest.

    They colonised football: every match came with a BLM knee-taking ritual and finger-wagging warnings about racial prejudice. They hit the streets, hollering ‘Stand up to racism!’ and ‘Silence is violence!’. They saw racism absolutely everywhere. In every nook of society, every innocent utterance. Remember when Sarah Vine was hauled over the coals for saying she had a ‘niggling’ feeling about Meghan Markle? Or when Lady Hussey was cancelled for asking someone: ‘Where are you from?’.

    Yet now they’re nowhere to be seen. Pooft – the professional racism-hunters have vanished without a trace. Which is weird because Britain is experiencing a genuine racism crisis right now. No, I don’t mean an elderly lady who is not au fait with newspeak accidentally put her foot in it during a chat with someone from an ethnic minority. I mean that real, nasty, even violent racism has returned to our shores. Its targets? Jews.

    Anti-Semitism has awoken from its slumber. Jewish institutions and Jewish people are being attacked. In London alone there have been 50 anti-Semitic incidents a day since the Hamas pogrom of 7 October. And yet from the self-styled anti-racists, those preening warriors against hate, we’ve heard virtually nothing. They haven’t marched. They haven’t written pained thinkpieces about the return of the 30s. They’ve been schtum. One wonders: is silence still violence?

    Consider the fiery attack on the office of Mike Freer, the Conservative MP for Finchley and Golders Green. Mr Freer himself is not Jewish, but he represents a constituency with the highest proportion of Jewish voters in the whole country. He has been subjected to relentless abuse for daring to stand up for Israel and for Jews. One correspondent told him ‘you’re the kind of person who deserved to be set alight’. Then his office was.

    We don’t know all the details. The police are treating it as arson but it isn’t clear who the arsonist was or what his motive might have been. It looks ominous, though. Freer has been targeted by bigots in the past. He was stalked by Ali Harbi Ali, the radical Islamist who went on to kill Sir David Amess MP. After that Freer and his staff took to wearing stab vests and carrying panic alarms.

    This should send a shudder down the spine of the nation. An MP threatened with death, stalked by a murderer and forced to wrap himself in severe security measures, all because he is a Tory and he defends Israel and he represents many Jews. That the MP for the largest Jewish constituency in Britain has feared for his life is shameful. Again, though, silence from so-called anti-racists.

    At certain points in the past ten weeks the anti-racists have piped up, but only to tell Jews to pipe down. Witness the ferocious mobbing of Stephen Fry after he gave the Alternative Christmas Message on the scourge of anti-Semitism. Leftists on X descended into an apoplexy of rage at the sight of a Jew talking about Jew hate. They branded Fry a genocide apologist, a narcissist, a c**t.

    It was a staggering spectacle. The kind of people who have the BLM fist and the Pride flag in their social-media bios – maybe even their pronouns – unleashed hellfire on a sexagenarian Jew simply for raising the problem of anti-Jewish racism. ‘Be Kind’ is their motto, but not to Jews.

    The silence of the self-righteous as Jew hatred has soared – a silence only punctured by their noisy denunciation of a Jew – has been incredibly revealing. It confirms, I think, that their ‘anti-racism’ was no such thing.

    Their privilege-checking, speech-policing and whipping up of Twitterstorms over every social or linguistic faux pas had nothing to do with tackling racism and everything to do with fortifying their own cultural power. These were really acts of moral distinction, ways for the right-thinking sections of society to demonstrate their moral superiority over the rest of us.

    So it’s not surprising they are spectacularly ill-equipped for an explosion of real and dangerous racism. Lecturing the gammon and noisily advertising their own decency is all they’re good for. Actually fighting racism, not so much.

    In fact, it’s worse. They’re not only shamefully silent about rising anti-Semitism – they’re partially responsible for it. It seems clear to me that the left’s heated rhetoric over Israel, which they treat as a uniquely murderous, almost demonic state, is giving licence to dark passions. It is sanctioning hate. After all, if Israel is evil, those who support it must be evil too. People like Mike Freer, perhaps.

    Everyone needs to get a grip. Calm and solidarity are urgently required if we are to ensure that our Jewish citizens feel safe and happy here.

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    SaveTheWest
    16 hours ago
    And yet from the self-styled anti-racists, those preening warriors against hate, we’ve heard virtually nothing.

    Because “anti-racism” is – and always was – a cover for mad-left anti-white racialism. And since Israelis are designated by the mad-left as “white”, they are deemed to be legitimate targets for the mad-left’s oh-so-kind hatred and violence. This is especially the case now that the mad-left’s Faustian pact with Islam is out in the open.

    1. But say hurty words about deranged men in wigs who claim to be women, or stand up (like Graham Linehan has) against transgender Ian, and Plod and the howling, braying mob of #bekind will be down on you like a ton of bricks and you will lose your livelihood.

      It’s almost as if the #bekind crew is a deranged cult with no ability for rational, cohesive thought.

  16. Wordle 923 4/6

    I did it in four today – a splendid result.

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    2. Early morning for me. And par

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  17. Geoff Hill
    What’s the truth about South Africa’s ‘genocide’ of white farmers?
    29 December 2023, 6:00am

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/GettyImages-1228090183.jpg
    Hundreds of farmers from South Africa’s Limpopo Province protest against attacks against farms

    s a crime against humanity at risk of unfolding in South Africa? Elon Musk, the Pretoria-born billionaire who owns X (Twitter) and Tesla, fears that there might be. Earlier this year, he wrote that he’d heard of calls for ‘a genocide of white people’ in his former homeland. Musk isn’t alone in his concerns. Steve Hofmeyr, a South African singer with a cult following, thinks that the ‘g-word’ is an appropriate way to describe what is unfolding: ‘If you think that the slaughter of South African farmers is not genocide enough, ask them about their land, language, religion, education, universities, heritage, monuments, safety, dignity and the race-based regulations imposed upon them and their children’. Donald Trump voiced a similar concern when he was in the White House. In a tweet that caused a diplomatic bust-up between South Africa and the United States in 2018, Trump referred to the ‘large-scale killing of farmers’. The government in Pretoria labelled his claim ridiculous, but was Trump right about what is unfolding?

    In South Africa, it’s a delicate topic. What is beyond doubt is that white farmers, who often live on large properties far from their neighbours or the nearest town, are seen by some as easy targets. The number of killings is worrying. Last year, there were more than 300 farm attacks and 50 murders. A particularly horrific incident in Mpumalanga, in the east of the country, happened in July: 79-year-old farmer Theo Bekker was bludgeoned over the head with an iron bar. His throat was slit and he bled to death. Bekker’s wife, Marlinda, was tied up and had a bag pulled over her head. Even when victims survive – as Marlinda did – the level of violence in these attacks can be ferocious. Torture and rape are common. Afrikaans Bibles have been left open on dismembered bodies.

    All too often, the timing of these attacks is no accident. Gangs — some high on drugs and alcohol — have been known to turn up at remote farms, armed to the teeth, often late in the month when employers have wads of cash in their homes ready to pay workers. It is unlikely to be a coincidence that the attack on Bekker’s farm took place on 30 July.

    Farmers are understandably afraid, but does what is happening in South Africa amount to a genocide? South Africa has the third-highest murder rate in the world, well ahead of Colombia and Mexico. The UK, with a similar population, has around 700 homicides a year; South Africa can log 450 in a week. Some of these victims are white farmers, but they are far from the only ones losing their lives at the hands of violent criminals. For every hundred murders, just 14 of the targets are women, 81 are men and five are children. Overwhelmingly, murder victims are young black men killed by other young, black men. Whites make up around eight per cent of the population and are the victims in roughly two per cent of murders. Poverty, rapid urbanisation, and vast numbers out of work have created a toxic situation that has given rise to crime, but not genocide.

    Based in Washington DC, Genocide Watch is the world’s early warning system. It was founded in 1999 by Dr Gregory Stanton, a professor of human-rights law, who says that ‘for all the tragedy of farm murders in South Africa, there is no evidence of a planned extermination’. There are instead, ‘opportunistic crimes’, sometimes acts of revenge by workers who are owed wages or feel aggrieved with their employers. Or just attacks carried out by thugs out for money.

    ‘We have studied this for many years,’ Stanton said, ‘and I’ve done research on the ground in South Africa. The numbers show us that white people, urban or rural, are much safer than their black counterparts, and less likely to end up on a slab at the coroner’s office.’ Farmers he said, ‘are often vulnerable, isolated and easy targets, but that doesn’t make it genocide’.

    The Democratic Alliance (DA) is the official opposition with the second-most seats in parliament after the ruling African National Congress (ANC). DA shadow minister for Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development, Phineas Masipa, agrees with Dr Stanton’s findings, but says there needs to be an investigation into all rural deaths, including farmers and the black workers and security guards often attacked by the same gangs.

    ‘No matter how we label this, a perception that farmers and their staff are not safe could deter the next generation of growers,’ he said. ‘This raises a concern around food security on a continent vulnerable to hunger.’

    White farmers in South Africa can hardly be blamed for feeling unsafe, but there’s scant evidence of murder and robbery being necessarily linked to skin colour. In an already violent country, the cost of living is soaring and tensions have been worsened by an influx of migrants from the rest of Africa, millions of whom have moved to Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town and even the remotest hamlet in search of work. These newcomers are typically from neighbouring states, like Zimbabwe and Mozambique, but also from Zambia, Malawi, Nigeria and even Pakistan and Bangladesh. Their presence has pushed up rents in the crowded townships where seven or eight black youths, often unemployed, might share a shack the size of a bathroom. Foreigners, they say, make it even more difficult to find a job.

    With an election due in May, and the ANC behind in the polls, police and immigration officials have started rounding up those without papers for deportation. It’s a popular move, but critics say they have seen the ruling party doing this before and that, when voting is over, the crackdowns will stop.

    In the past year, there have been attacks on trucks taking freight to the port city of Durban with mobs torching vehicles they say are driven by foreigners. Drivers are beaten and chased away, and the highways are closed for hours while police clear the mess.

    Dr Stanton says this is a smouldering fuse. ‘In any country, one death is too many and we must not ignore the plight of white farmers. But there are worrying reports about xenophobia against black migrants. The first step towards a genocide happens when people are labelled as “the other”: different, dangerous and alien. China is doing it now with the Uyghur Muslims.’

    Stanton believes the problem has several causes. ‘Oppressive governments in other parts of Africa have forced many into exile. The South African authorities have done little to stem the inflow, and unemployment has resulted in a level of misery among the youth that is hard for people in Britain or America to comprehend. This, in turn, has unleashed the resentment against foreigners.’

    He said it was a situation the United Nations and human-rights groups should be watching closely. But, all too often, the response of such organisations is simply silence. Meanwhile, there’s no sign that the rate at which South Africans are being murdered — some white, but overwhelmingly black — will slow anytime soon.

    2. What has the Daily Telegraph sunk to when they can publish that “The number of killings is worrying.”?
      Yes, comes across as very worried. Not.

      ” we must not ignore the plight of white farmers. But there are worrying reports about xenophobia against black migrants. The first step towards a genocide happens when people are labelled as “the other”: different, dangerous and alien. China is doing it now with the Uyghur Muslims.’”

      So even though the article purports to be about white people, you must talk about black people and muslims because you cannot ignore the groups that stand as perpetual victims. The brain re-programming required to realise that black people are killing white people out of racism is too great.

      We’re heading for similar massacres in the West at the moment.

  18. Nigel Biggar
    The British Museum is the best home for the Elgin Marbles
    29 December 2023, 6:30am

    Should the Elgin Marbles be returned? Greece’s argument, put forward recently by the country’s foreign minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, is well rehearsed: the Marbles, he claimed, were ‘essentially stolen’ from their rightful owners by Lord Elgin at the turn of the 19th century – and they belong in the Acropolis, not the British Museum. Only when the looted sculptures are reunited with their siblings in Athens, we’re told, can the ensemble reveal its authentic meaning. The reality is rather more complex. The case for the British Museum returning the Marbles to Athens – albeit by the legal fiction of a ‘loan’ – is weak.

    The facts are these. The Acropolis, on which the Parthenon stands, had been used by the Ottomans as a strategic military base for centuries. In 1687, under siege by the Venetians, a gunpowder store in the Parthenon exploded, destroying part of the building. The Ottoman authorities cared so little that the antiquarian debris was still litt­er­ing the ground more than a cent­ury later when Elgin’s agents arr­ived on the scene. They found Ottoman soldiers destabilising the remaining sculptures by prising out the lead from the clamps holding the marble blocks together, in order to make bullets. Elgin had secured from the highest official in Constantinople authorisation to take away ‘any pieces of stone with old inscriptions, and figures’.

    Now aware of the vulnerability of the sculptures, he persuaded the city governor, in the presence of an official from the sultan’s court, that this open-ended permission extended to those, too. The work of removing the Marbles then proceeded in full public view over two-and-a-half years from 1801. The last shipment to London left nine years later. Had the authorities objected, they could easily have stopped it. But they didn’t. Elgin didn’t nick the Marbles; he rescued them.

    Even if we discount the history, what of the supporting argument – put forward by Geoffrey Robertson, KC, in his book-length case for the prosecution, Who Owns History? – that, since they represent ‘the essence of Greekness’, the Marbles should now be returned to Greece? That essence is supposed to be democracy, yet in the ‘democracy’ that Periclean Athens supported when the Parthenon was built, 30,000 citizens elected representatives to the legislative assembly, which ruled over 300,000 unenfranchised women and slaves. That was far more like England’s medieval parliament than today’s democratic one.

    And whereas contemporary Greeks may project onto the Parthenon’s sculptures an embodiment of their own ideals, their original meaning to ancient Athenians was imperial triumph and to ancient Spartans and Corinthians, imperial oppression. The Marbles have no single, authentic meaning. They meant contrary things to ancient Greek peoples. They mean something different to contemporary Greeks. And they mean something different again to international visitors to the British Museum, where their juxtaposition to art from all over the world provokes fresh insight into human cultures.

    If the curators of the New Acropolis Museum in Athens want to display what the original Parthenon looked like, with all its parts together in a glorious whole – ‘reuniting this one work of art’, as Lord Ed Vaizey put it last month on the Today programme, echoing Mr Mitsotakis – then modern visual technology stands ready to project it.

    The case in favour of keeping the Elgin Marbles in London is a strong one. Returning them to Athens out of a misplaced sense of colonial guilt would serve to entrench the ‘decolonising’ left’s narrative more deeply in our institutions and public opinion. That, in turn, would increase Britain’s vulnerability to further unjustified claims.

    One coming down the tracks at speed is the demand for compensation for slavery. In September, it was reported that the Caribbean Community (Caricom) Reparations Commission will seek £15.48 trillion in reparations from Britain. The present Conservative government is reassuringly resistant. When asked in April whether he would commit Britain to ‘reparatory justice’, the Prime Minister firmly declined, adding that ‘trying to unpick our history is not the right way forward, and it’s not something that we will focus our energies on’.

    But resistance may well weaken, should Labour enter No. 10 next year. In his tendentious argument for reparations, Britain’s Black Debt, the Caricom commission’s chairman, Sir Hilary Beckles, made sure to name-check recent Labour ministers or shadow-ministers by quoting them at the beginning of most chapters. It was a Labour MP, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, who put the question about reparations to the Prime Minister back in the Spring. And, since the Autumn, the Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien has been funding a slavery-reparations campaign in parliament through the office of another Labour MP, Clive Lewis.

    Any prime minister who wants to shield British taxpayers from opportunistic claims for reparations will treat the truth about Britain’s imperial history with the greatest care. And any PM who cares about Britain’s historical record, will veto the British Museum’s return of the Elgin Marbles until the strong case against it has been answered. Keir Starmer has complacently declared that he won’t stand in the museum’s way. Rishi Sunak has signalled that he is made of sterner stuff.

    Nigel Biggar is Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford and author of the bestselling Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023), whose paperback edition, with a new Postscript, will come out in February

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-british-museum-is-the-best-home-for-the-elgin-marbles/

      1. It is going to be incredibly difficult. As my sister said, there is nothing we can do about it.I honestly think it’s deliberate. An engineered decline to cause so much damage so quickly that the IMF are forced to step in and then they, with the civil service will stitch us up to ensure annoyances like democracy never bother their grand vision again.

        As we saw with the oaf Brown, when his taxes are threatened his default is to use force. The Left never change (and that includes the current socialists in office).

        Weirdly, the best hope is for things to get so bad, so quickly that the state simply collapses in on itself.

    2. I like Quentin Lett’s suggestion best, send them back to Turkey.

      Worse than the swindle of returning marbles that were rescued by Lord Elgin at enormous cost, is the lie that would travel round the world that Britain had admitted to stealing them. Of course this is meat and drink to the Islington socialists – but it puts white people and Britons in physical danger when the rest of the world believes that the British Empire was founded on plundering, which is what they believe at present. Any problems like not enough food or money, you can kill a British person without guilt, because that’s what they did to your ancestors. Illogical and wicked, but millions have been brainwashed into believing it.
      Windows showed me a photo of a fantastic nineteenth century viaduct in Sri Lanka recently – not a word about this infrastructure having been built by Britain, of course.

    3. Sunak is made from jelly. He’s done nothing about the Marbles because his masters don’t care about them. The second they see a way to humiliate the UK and hasten our economic decline or international degradation Sunak will be instructed to get rid of them and he will, because he’s an imposed stooge.

  19. Good morning all.
    A dry start with a clear sky that has given a more seasonal 1½°C outside and a slightly past full waning gibbous moon is setting through the trees opposite.

  20. Jacques Delors poisoned British democracy – Tom Harris

    “J acques Delors, whose death was announced this week, could claim to have had a greater impact on British politics than any of his predecessors or successors as European Commission president. Indeed, he was key to the process by which the British Labour movement transformed itself from avowedly Eurosceptic to one that was overwhelmingly pro-eu.

    Much is made of Delors’s keynote address to the Trades Union Congress in 1988, when, according to the more rose-tinted version of events, his rhetoric so moved his previously belligerent audience that they almost instantaneously gave up on their previous attempts to end Britain’s membership of what was then known as the European Community (EC). At the 1983 general election, Labour had pledged to negotiate Britain’s withdrawal from the bloc, a promise fully endorsed by most of the party’s trade union affiliates.

    But Delors’s vision of a Europe with a “social dimension” – in which every worker in every member state was guaranteed better working conditions covered by a “collective agreement” with their employer – was only so attractive because of the UK political context of the time. As in 1983, the 1987 general election had resulted in a landslide for Margaret Thatcher’s (pro-european) Conservatives. The unions were facing the prospect of many more years of paying millions of pounds of their members’ dues to a party that seemed incapable of moving from impotent opposition into government.

    And then Delors came along with a new vision, offering the very radical social and economic change for Britain that the voters had overwhelmingly rejected, despite Neil Kinnock’s glossy election campaign. No wonder the idea was an exciting one.

    If the unions and the Labour Party itself could swallow their scepticism about the EC – and let’s face it, where had opposition to it got them so far? – then at least some of the progressive changes they wanted might still be secured without the need for the direct approval of the voters. The pill was sweetened by Delors’s focus on solidarity, inclusion and co-operation – exactly the kind of language that was rarely heard on the lips of Mrs Thatcher, whose support for the single market was feared to mask a new era of cut-throat, pan-continental capitalism.

    Delors’s vision allowed the trade unions and the Labour Party to regard the EC as an ally of theirs in the fight against the prime minister. Future general elections may well be lost (and were), but so long as we remained in the EC, we could count on our Left-wing allies across the Channel to make the sort of changes that electoral and parliamentary arithmetic denied Labour the opportunity to accomplish.

    It was a fatal bargain. Less than a year after Delors’s appearance at the TUC, Labour had transformed its position on Europe, winning an impressive victory over the Conservatives at the 1989 European parliament elections on a promise to work towards Delors’s vision of a “social Europe”. But the fundamentally undemocratic foundation of the new policy platform proved to be a ticking time bomb for the party.

    Having successfully performed such a screeching and electorally successful

    U-turn on Europe, Labour became so devoutly pro-eu that it never felt the need to debate or even question the principle of whether Brussels was right to impose on any nation measures that had been rejected by its electorate. As with the Conservatives, Euroscepticism in Labour became the obsession of a tiny faction.

    Freedom of movement, the single market and customs union all became no more than an inevitable part of political life, to be handled but never questioned. Which meant that, when David Cameron called the Brexit referendum, Labour was in no fit state ideologically to participate in the debate. Having avoided answering the fundamental democratic questions over the EU’S mandate to dictate policy to its member states, Labour floundered, its political certainties of the last three decades exposed as having been built on sand.

    When defeat for Remain arrived, it felt like a logical response to the arrogance of a political establishment that had interpreted Delors’s words as a green light to impose a political agenda without the necessity of a messy electoral mandate. All that was needed instead was the attachment of a label bearing the EU flag. They were wrong, and so was Delors. Labour is still paying the price.”

    1. MOH and I voted Leave simply because of the requirement to join the Euro by 2025.

      Bear in mind that all the very vocal Remainers, including the BBC and Sky, obviously want Britain to join the Euro.

      However they’ve never publicly made any case for that.

      We wonder why?

      1. We voted to leave to restore Common Law over Corpus Juris. I’m sick of the principle that you can’t do anything unless the State passes a law to let you do it.

    2. When I speak to remoaners who sigh and look pained after I tell them why we had to leave the EU i ask them why they wanted to stay chained. Most don’t know. It’s just ‘what they thought best’. I ask them to detail the parts of hte Lisbon treaty they agree with. They don’t have a clue. I ask them why they think a protectionist economy is a good thing, when demonstrably it isn’t. They don’t know.

      Most people realise they’re ignorant and go away to read about it. The truly hard core eventually expose themselves are bitter, resentful people who just hate those who disagree with them.

      There is no rational argument for the EU. Free trade, yes. After all, it’s silly hiking tariff walls and taxes. The only people who think otherwise are governments. There is no need for a bunch of arrogant communists to dictate how multiple nations should use water, or energy, or roads, or fuel.

  21. The year America became a banana republic. Spiked. 29 December 2023.

    Joe Biden and the Democrats have ruthlessly weaponised the American justice system to go after their enemies and protect their friends. In 2023, their abuses of power became impossible to ignore. The US is now starting to look more like a backward banana republic than a modern constitutional democracy.

    True but arguably things are worse in Europe and the UK. Here democracy itself is fading from existence and being replaced by authoritarian Police States.

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/12/29/the-year-america-became-a-banana-republic/

    1. It became a banana republic in 2020 when the election was blatantly stolen.

      Edit: actually, probably years before that when it was taken over by a private cabal of bankers in 1913.

      1. What I’d not previously realised is that the USA was subject to a total coup in 1963 with the installation of LBJ after the assassination of President Kennedy.

        1. yes, I only realised that recently too. Have you read The Creature from Jekyll Island? I have started it.

    2. It became a banana republic in 2020 when the election was blatantly stolen.

      Edit: actually, probably years before that when it was taken over by a private cabal of bankers in 1913.

  22. A May general election would hide the green shoots of Tory recovery. 29 December 2023.

    I’m not so sure about this logic. This year certainly has been cruel to Sunak: the Rwanda humiliation, strikes, the resignations and feuding. But look closely and you can see a number of trends starting to turn good. Not enough to save him, perhaps, but enough to say that his policies are working.

    It takes quite a bit to boggle me but Nelson has succeeded here. How anyone could write such utter tosh and expect anyone to believe it must have skin as thick as a Rhinoceros.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/12/28/a-may-general-election-would-hide-the-green-shoots/

  23. Good morning, all. Late on parade and will be later as – through sheer idleness – I am going back to bed!

  24. G’morning all,

    Light cloud with some breaks in it over McPhee Towers, showers forecast later, Wind in the South-West to West, 7℃ rising to 9℃ today.

    I have another recommendation from Millenniyule 2023 – “Bringing the dissident right to you”. This is one of the first of the series with historian “Apostolic Majesty” The subject is monarchy, specifically British monarchy, from Charles I to Charles III and how it has changed, or been changed, over the last 350 years. It finishes with an assessment, an edictment even, of King Charles III who wants to be King of the World, and his heir. It is by no means boring.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/01f1c7d6975c45bfcbcf1439d12a10472527a3cbe628985a078ec0ad90f246b6.png

    https://odysee.com/@millennialwoes:4/MY2023ApostolicMajesty:8

          2. “…one of those TWO.”

            Who’s the other one? I’ve forgotten most of the Latin I learnt at school 68-69 years ago.

          4. Ha ha. We probably have more than two on this forum who understand Latin. Wish I were one of them but sadly not. I enquired of an Italian friend who studied Latin as to the correct pronunciation of a particular word and without telling me it was a silly question she illustrated why it was by pointing out that we simply don’t know how the Romans sounded when they spoke Latin.

          5. Indeed. As an A Level Latin student I (together with my companion) had two Latin teachers; one pronounced the language in the traditional way, the other in the Italianate fashion.

  25. G’morning all,

    Light cloud with some breaks in it over McPhee Towers, showers forecast later, Wind in the South-West to West, 7℃ rising to 9℃ today.

    I have another recommendation from Millenniyule 2023 – “Bringing the dissident right to you”. This is one of the first of the series with historian “Apostolic Majesty” The subject is monarchy, specifically British monarchy, from Charles I to Charles III and how it has changed, or been changed, over the last 350 years. It finishes with an assessment, an edictment even, of King Charles III who wants to be King of the World, and his heir. It is by no means boring.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/01f1c7d6975c45bfcbcf1439d12a10472527a3cbe628985a078ec0ad90f246b6.png

    https://odysee.com/@millennialwoes:4/MY2023ApostolicMajesty:8

  26. Good morning.
    I’m glad people are catching onto the rewilding scam, which is just another way of reducing the amount of food that is grown in Britain, along with carbon capture, the woodland trust and solar power stations.

    1. I am a life member of the Woodland Trust and have long considered trees essential to our wellbeing and almost certainly our survival as a civilised species. If we are just destined to be a plague on the planet concerned purely as a stomach to be stuffed with consumer products, then I am ashamed to be human and look forward to my early and just demise.

      That said, it is purity of argument that is at fault. Why should food production and respect for other life be mutually exclusive? Rather, as with mature debate, it is about optimising the balance between the two, so that the maximum benefit of both conflicting interests prevails, rather than the dominance of one and the extermination of the other.

      I remember an article in ‘Farmers’ Weekly’ a while ago, whereby the environmental benefits within a large arable field were minimal, but around the field edges for around 5 metres in, it made a huge difference to biodiversity and the natural health of all sorts of benign and even beneficial species to desist from spraying or clearing there. It is a variant of the ancient tithe system, whereby one claims only 90% of the productive capacity, leaving 10% to God. This makes life so much better for everyone, and not least the farmer, who is rewarded for his generosity in many ways beyond the bottom line.

      I have long argued that one of the best techniques for carbon capture, and little mentioned by the metropolitans, is the conversion of farm and garden organic waste into humus – a stable material produced by micro-organisms breaking down carbon-rich matter that vastly improves the quality of a soil, as well as locking up carbon taken by the crop and other plants from atmospheric carbon dioxide. It is many years since I have had a bonfire on my land. Rather, I pile up brash, clippings and other garden waste and let it rot down in its own time. I could not try that in places such as Australia, California or the Mediterranean prone to wildfire, but can be done in places with a wet maritime climate such as the UK.

      1. As an 18-year old, I laboured on a farm, learning all kinds of useful skills I still use.
        The Farmer kept all his hedges, and trees growing in the hedgerows, and neither sprayed nor planted up to the edge.
        45 years ahead of his time.

      3. Mankind is amongst the most spectacular animals on earth because we can think. We can solve problems by adapting our environment to suit us. Ants build homes. We start out with stone and mud and can now use foamed ceramic bricks and fluid suspension insulation. We can create hot water using fuels beyond body heat.

        We invented a mass transport system, air travel, electrical transmission to communicate across the planet at the speed of light and we use these common place things for abject luxury!

        How staggering is our lifestyle, where could we go from here?

        Oh. If we let the greens decide backward, to caves, huddling behind stone walls, dying at 40. Illiterate – as that, folks is the intent. It is not about science, not about ecology it is about forcing their world order, returning to the priesthood of green where they are the priests living in luxury while everyone else is a peasant, serving them. That folks, is their plan.

      4. I used to support the Woodland Trust until I realised it was just part of the reduction in food production. There’s now more woodland in Britain than at any time since the eighteenth century.
        That’s nice and all, but in places where you could grow veg before, you now can’t easily because of rabbits and deer.

        “carbon” doesn’t change the climate, so we don’t need to worry about it, but the things you mention are sensible things to do anyway – I agree about the 90%. But the other 10% shouldn’t be a blasted solar power station!

    2. BB2, don’t forget that recently the Government closed the last nitrogenous fertiliser plant in Britain.

      For the first time in over 100 years Britain cannot produce any of its own nitrogenous fertiliser.

      1. And that lack combined with rigged energy created a shortage which sent the cost of fertilizer soaring and subsequent food inflation to 30%.

        Every problem we’re having is down to state meddling over a hoax.

  27. Morning, all Y’all.
    Wind & rain in yer Brizzol. Weird dreams last night… Now breakfast, then check-in for (hopefully) flight through Schophol to Oslo.

    1. Morning, Paul. My friend, Bertil, refers to that Amsterdam airport hub as “Shithole” since he inevitably gets grief from the Customs bods there.

      2. Steady as you go, Paul When working in Weegie for Wihelmsens I used to get direct flights (by Norwegian) to Gardermoen.

      3. It takes longer at Schipol to to move on to your bay after landing than the flight from London City Airport.

      4. It takes longer at Schipol to to move on to your bay after landing than the flight from London City Airport.

    3. Yo Ol

      A longtime ago, pre SatNav, we took the wrong road out of Amsterdam and needed to do a 180 turn.

      We looked at the map and realised that if we left the motorway, drove through Schipol, we could come out, heading in the right direction

      Lotsa locals stared at us in amazement You do not see many caravans being towed through airports

  28. 381005+ up ticks,

    Morning Each,

    A sound investment, I think not, could have been worse if situated next to a field of mirrors.

    These governing criminal cartels cannot be surpassed in their suppression / manipulation of weak minded peoples .

    As for a killing off / culling agenda you cannot fault the
    lab/lib/con coalition party, all done with the majority voters consent, gruesome black comedy at its finest.

    Keep in mind whilst sitting atop of gas / oil fields that hypothermia KILLS.

    Via the governing mafia type political parties we have / are being invaded by mass paedophiles / rapist / welfare abusers/
    assorted knife / gun killers, this besides suffering via the party politicos, mass neglection of the law, clearly seen not to be working.

    All the above currently supported through the ballot station by the party NAME before Country brigade, may one ask, “just who are the enemy”

    https://x.com/Dedicated_Being/status/1740329649492885551?s=20

    1. We had a wind generator on Mianda. The blades flew off in a gale.

      We also had solar panels. In Turkey we were hit by a tornado in the middle of the night which virtually capsized Mianda and turned us through 360 degrees and it got under one of the panels which disappeared into space!

      Wind energy is great for sailing – but not so good for making electrickery! However the solar panels were useful during the summer but did not provide enough throughout the year and we had to use a petrol generator.

      1. Same as the windmills needing gas and diesel backup. Lefties don’t like admitting that ‘green energy’ is likely a shipping container sized diesel generator.

      1. 381005+ up ticks

        Morning SJ,

        A win double would be a chain reaction, plus the domino effect that would definitely be beneficial to all.

    3. All major faults and obvious indiscretions, caused continualy by lack of good judgement.
      Carried out with selected lunacy by our string of useless politicians, HoL, governments and Whitehall.
      Not a clue.

      1. 381005+ up ticks,

        Morning RE,

        “String of useless politicians ” when viewed via treachery detector eyes they cannot be bettered in the art of betrayal.

        1. Strung up might be suitable but they are never brought to book.
          And from what I read recently it could be that POS Blair, the ‘they’ have lined up to take over.

      3. The damage the state is doing by deliberately rigging the market is staggering. It’s hilarious that after the success of privatisation the Tories are dedicated to undoing it.

      1. Problem is the blades will go back on – at tax payers expense and the pointless thing set to running again.

      1. 381005+ up ticks,

        Morning Anne,

        One factual truth is, that for more of the same the usual voting pattern MUST be adhered to.

    6. They do have a cut off. If too windy they don’t operate. If no wind they don’t operate. They cannot exist without massive subsidy, stolen from crushing taxes on conventional fuels that are slapped on to bills.

      The state deliberately distorts the energy markets solely to protect unreliables. Left greeniacs refuse to acknowledge this. Some even think coal and gas are subsidised by wind!

    7. The idiots in the devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales (and probably Northern Ireland for all i know) are determined to “out-green” each other (and, crucially, their mortal oppressor, “England”) by siting millions of these non-eco bird-mincers all over their beautiful countryside, even if it means turfing everyone else off who already lives and works there. It is so sole-destroying, how stupid and delusional these people are.

  29. A book review worth reading:

    This attack on Churchill is appalling – and nonsensical

    Walter Reid’s vicious book says Churchill was ‘malign, cruel, obstructive and selfish’ toward India – but its argument doesn’t hold water

    Andrew Roberts
    27 December 2023 • 11:00am

    Walter Reid, the author of an admiring biography of Neville Chamberlain, has written a book claiming that Winston Churchill’s attitude towards India was “malign, cruel, obstructive and selfish”. Pleasingly, however, Fighting Retreat: Churchill and India utterly fails to prove any of those accusations, except that Churchill tried to obstruct self-government for India from 1930 to 1935, which is hardly a state secret.

    Reid revels in hyperbole, stating that Churchill displayed a “disingenuous and unprincipled opposition to any initiative which might edge India, however slightly, out of the clutches of Great Britain”. (Those were the “clutches”, by the way, that gave India her railways, mass education system, irrigation projects, law and order, English language as her first national lingua franca, universities, newspapers, standardised units of exchange, telegraphic communications, an uncorrupt legal system, medical advances, and the abolition of the widespread practice of burning widows alive on their husbands’ funeral pyres.)

    Was Churchill really “disingenuous and unprincipled” in his five years of opposition to the Government of India Act 1935? Even as hostile a critic as Reid accepts that he pursued his campaign even to the detriment of his own career, and it kept him out of government until the Second World War. If anyone was unprincipled at that time, it was in fact the National Government, which Reid admits tampered with the vital evidence given to Parliament by Lancastrian manufacturers about the likely commercial implications of Indian self-government. Churchill never did anything like that.

    There was also nothing disingenuous about Churchill’s central message about the dangers of over-hasty Indian self-government, which was that the Hindus would use their numerical advantage to strip the Indian Princes, with whom Britain had treaty obligations, of their powers, as well as dominate the Muslim minority and keep the Untouchables at the bottom of an unaltered caste system. Those were the essential bases of Churchill’s critique, and Indian history from 1947 to the present day has proven him correct in all three. Not a word from Reid about Churchill’s prescience; instead he is accused of “a malign continuum of deceitful and hypocritical attempts to thwart India’s entirely reasonable political aspirations”.

    Churchill believed the British Empire was worth defending, and feared national decline if India left it, and so he fought to keep the status quo, but he did it from decent motives which Reid either ignores or denies. It was a losing battle, but only because Britain nearly bankrupted herself helping to save the world from fascism. If Britain had had no need to come to India’s aid in 1941, which she did because it was part of the Empire, it’s likely that it would have been invaded by Imperial Japan, with tens of millions of Indians dying, if other Japanese occupations such as the Philippines are anything to go by.

    Reid is on similarly weak ground where he considers other aspects of Churchill’s career. It was not Churchill’s “force of character” that prevented the War Cabinet from pursuing peace negotiations with Hitler in May 1940, for example: he was in a four-to-one majority there, as the biographer of Neville Chamberlain ought to have known. Reid’s criticism of successive prime ministers and secretaries of state for India for not visiting India during their time in office has a straightforward explanation: the Viceroy of India had constitutional precedence there.

    We shall be marking the 150th anniversary of Churchill’s birth in 2024, and along with a panoply of celebrations, there will inevitably be a chorus of the usual baleful criticisms, many focused on his supposedly inadequate response to the appalling Bengal Famine of 1943, which killed over three million people. The facts are straightforward, and confirmed by the meticulous report of the official inquiry, which did not hesitate to allocate blame. A typhoon in late 1942 destroyed both Bengal’s rice and the road and rail networks that were needed to get emergency aid to the region. The Japanese controlled the areas such as Malaya, Burma and Thailand from where rice could normally be shipped, and Churchill wrote to ask the leaders of America, Canada and Australia to send food supplies, although Japanese submarines in the Bay of Bengal made such operations difficult. The Bengal authorities, both British and Indian – the province had been self-governing since 1935 – failed to requisition rice from local merchants, as food prices soared. The Viceroy in Delhi ought to have acted sooner imposing central authority. But none of this was the fault of the government in London, let alone Churchill.

    Fortunately Reid is enough of an objective historian to recognize that Churchill did not deliberately want to use the opportunity to kill Bengalis, as alleged by his detractors – who ignore the separation of powers in wartime India – but Reid does quote those detractors ad nauseam. And in swallowing whole the Left-wing economic view that Britain was simply an exploitative leech on India from 1600 to 1947, Reid parrots the profoundly flawed analyses of authors such as Shashi Tharoor, Richard Toye and Sathnam Sanghera. He quotes Tharoor’s belief that “Britain’s Industrial Revolution was built on the destruction of India’s thriving manufacturing industries” and that “slave-related businesses contributed the same proportion of British GDP as the professional and support services sector does in modern Britain”, despite both claims having been comprehensively exploded in review after review of Tharoor’s deeply bigoted book. By contrast, there is no indication that Reid has read the works of scholars such as Tirthankar Roy, Zareer Masani and Kartar Lalvani who prove that Anglo-Indian trade was extraordinarily beneficial to both countries.

    “His consistent policy towards India from 1930 onwards cannot be excused or justified,” Reid claims of Churchill. “It was dishonest, mendacious and immoral.” Yet Churchill gave literally hundreds of speeches on the topic up and down the country for half a decade, often to huge audiences. If it was genuinely any of those three adjectives, why was it not denounced as such at the time? Contemporaries criticised his stance as wrong or short-sighted or dangerous, but they recognised that he was pursuing his campaign out of honorable motives, and so should we.

    Others of Reid’s accusations, such as that Churchill “never matured” from being a subaltern, or that he was responsible for Hindus and Muslims being “divided among themselves” – when the divide had begun centuries before Churchill’s birth – are frankly risible. One is left with the strong sense that Churchill was neither “malign” nor “cruel”, but that this book is both.

    Andrew Roberts is the author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny. Fighting Retreat: Churchill and India is published by C Hurst at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/fighting-retreat-churchill-india-walter-reid-review/

        1. No need to be sorry! I expect some of us missed it then and it’s pretty devastating for a book review.

      2. In that case, I’ll repeat my comment from yesterday:

        British rule in India was pretty hands-off. State princes had a great deal of autonomy so when Bengal is raised, I ask why the other Indian states did not offer help to Bengal.

    3. Speaking of Churchill….Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a film by Guy Richie coming soon…

      Top secret WW2 SAS raid is revealed at last: Commandos stole train

      and drove it behind enemy lines to rescue hundreds from concentration

      camp in incredible mission that has been kept under wraps for 80 years.

      https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12906847/Top-secret-WW2-SAS-raid-revealed-Commandos-stole-train-drove-enemy-lines-rescue-hundreds-concentration-camp-incredible-mission-kept-wraps-80-years.html

      1. I hope they didn’t shoot anyone or there will need to be a war crimes investigation! /sarc

      2. I hope they didn’t shoot anyone or there will need to be a war crimes investigation! /sarc

  30. Morning all 🥴
    Not good today, I’m having an uninvited visit from Noro, the virus that just turns up unannounced.
    Possibly picked up from our grandchildren. It’s not at all pleasant.
    No other details available. 🤢😖
    Staying in bed.

      1. Our biggest problem Anne is our youngest grandson he has leukemia and has no imune system, bless him.

  31. The West may now have no option but to attack Iran. 29 December 2023.

    Only if Israel, America, Britain, and others show they possess the resolve and capability to impose significant costs on Iran, as punishment for its aggression, will they persuade the ayatollahs that proceeding further will bring them intolerable pain. Very likely, only direct military force, applied against critical targets inside Iran, will impose such costs, proving to Tehran it has miscalculated not only about Israel, but on President Biden and the West more generally. That is why the evidence of a direct Iranian attack on a commercial ship in the Indian Ocean is potentially so important.

    Just what we need. Another War. That every such action in the last twenty years has been an utter disaster has clearly escaped Bolton. Not just for the countries we attacked but for Europe. I seem to detect in all this incompetence an inescapable drive toward all-out war on many fronts. Even the ultimate. A nuclear exchange no longer seems unthinkable.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/12/28/the-west-may-now-have-no-option-but-to-attack-iran/

    2. I see we are sending a gun boat to Guyana, yet again interfering with the conflicts of others. I haven’t looked at Venezuela’s naval resources but I wouldn’t be too surprised if they used our vessel as target practise.

  32. Well said Daley Thompson

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-12908457/trans-athletes-female-events-finished-DALEY-THOMPSON.html

    Some of my good friends, including the Czech-American tennis star Martina Navratilova and the record-breaking British competitive swimmer Sharron Davies, have done so and been on the receiving end of shocking abuse from trans extremists as a result.
    I want the whole world to know I stand beside them.
    I have also been appalled at the violent threats aimed at novelist J.K. Rowling, who has spoken nothing but calm common sense.
    Does that make me a feminist? Well, no one has ever called me that before, but there’s a first time for everything.
    What I do know is that I’m not transphobic or a misogynist – two slurs that have been chucked at me on Twitter.
    If we become afraid to tell the truth, we really are in trouble.
    And if trans women are allowed to compete in female categories, then women’s sport isn’t just in trouble – it’s finished.

    1. Always liked DT, haven’t heard about him for donkey’s years. Probably just living a decent normal life. His head’s above the parapet now though.
      A shame he has to insert the old caveat of “Whilst fully supporting the rights etc…

    3. He’s right, of course, as are Navratilova, Davies and JKR, among others, but this used to be called “common sense”. How the trans lobby, some of the most bigoted, antagonistic of “activists” can refer to others as “haters” is beyond irony.

    4. Tell trannies, of all flavours, to simply organise their own events; and leave normal people to continue competing against each other in normal events.

      1. Would there have to be two categories; male to female and female to male?
        On second thoughts, if they compete against each other, the lie would be well and truly exposed.

        1. Chuck them all in together as a Weirdo category.
          How they organise themselves is of no interest, whatsoever, to me. I shall simply not watch them.

      2. He says exactly that, earlier in the article. And he’s right.

        One significant problem is that once it was separated it would be of little interest to the vast majority of spectators and thus unviable financially.

        Most of the sporting trannies are male to female; inadequates who were/are incapable of competing at the level they would win genuine kudos. Most of them are attention seekers, enjoying the attention they get.

    5. But that’s the intent, isn’t it? To make and keep people afraid of telling the truth to allow the insanity to continue.

      Then one day when children are raped because the truth was silenced before we won’t push back and instead plod, social services, councils will apply massive pressure to protect the rapists.

      Oh, hang on. That’s already happened.

    1. There’s a sort of library cum elderly person’s coffee room opposite one of these barbers. My chum works there and tells me there are 2, maybe three customers a day yet the 3 staff are constantly ringing up sales.

  34. “Wearing underpants as trousers has been predicted to become the new year’s hottest fashion trend by a Vogue executive.” – DT. In previous times, you would have been considered as the village looney and kept in a safe place. As for myself, I find wearing pants on my head clears a path in crowded areas and keeps my ears warm…

        1. They were summer weight WAAF bloomers (blackouts were the winter weight navy ones). I am a mine of useless information 🙂

    2. My mother, who still converts into shilllings and when asked ‘what is 320mm’ wanted it in inches – inches, for goodness sake – demanded to be told in one word why metric was superior. A precocious child at the back said ‘Ten. Everything is base ten.’

      Mother still converts into imperial. She still gets measurements wrong.

        1. If we had evolved with five fingers and a thumb on each hand I daresay that’s the counting system that we’d have developed.

        2. Try and get same precocious child to wrap 5 eggs and 5 bottles, then set him the same problem using 6 and 6.

          1. Why would you wrap an egg and a bottle and what’s the difference of 5 or 6?

            Base ten works. It is simple, uncomplicated. Metric is the obvious measurement. That amuhricahns use inches is bizarre.

          3. The difference in wrapping 5s and 6s. Why do you think eggs don’t come in metric from (always base 12) Same with bottles of wine or beer

      2. I’m with your mum on this one. And the man on the Beeb – i want things as they were (he said “are”, but that was back then).

        1. I honestly don’t see why. Base ten is simple, straigthtforward and clear. It’s like using Saxon instead of English.

        1. 13 inches. Well, roughly 13 inches, not exactly. Assuming wot I were taught about a meter being 39 inches woz correct.

          1. My point, Sue. You can’t write it exactly in decimal form, whether inches, feet, mm, cm, whatever.

        1. £33.33. Remainder 1. Not complicated. This continual fight against rational measurements is idiotic.

          2 and 2/17’s is just backward.

  36. Well – the Monty Python prog was, I am sad to say, rubbish. It was a full length film in which the stitched together many of their “funny” bits. Dead Parrot; gay soldiers drilling; lumberjack song. but it was really dire. The MR loved it because she was a raver back then. I didn’t larf once.

    1. Farage should have added – like inflation; you are doing nothing about it, just claiming credit for factors outside your control.

  38. Good Moaning.
    Family round this evening for the NOT TURKEY Dinner.
    I THINK we have everything we need down from the attic and out of our friends’ barn!

          1. I love slow cooking.
            When we have people round for a meal I want to enjoy their company, not be fretting around because they are a bit late (is this the moment to mention the A12?) or are chatting happily over drinks.

      5. Our ham is in the garage at the moment soaking in its spiced brine solution. This evening we shall change the brine for fresh water and leave it to soak to get rid of the excess salt. On Sunday evening Caroline, aided by the more competent of our house guests, will boil it, then skin it, score the fat, stud it with cloves, cover with honey and mustard and bake it and present it on Sunday night for our New Year’s Eve Feast.

        https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b88b7a774b7134d8231ec1b83883ed79772ed50858fce12fbb4fe57c1e3fbcd0.jpg

        1. When I posted this snap before Bill Thomas, ever polite, suggested that my corpulence was the consequence of having eaten too many pies!.

        2. I soaked a pork belly in water, this morning, after having it sealed in a vacuum-packed plastic bag in the fridge for the past week, curing in a mixture of salt, black pepper and black treacle. It is now in the smoker enjoying an 18-hour cold-smoke in smouldering beech sawdust smoke.

      6. Our ham is in the garage at the moment soaking in its spiced brine solution. This evening we shall change the brine for fresh water and leave it to soak to get rid of the excess salt. On Sunday evening Caroline, aided by the more competent of our house guests, will boil it, then skin it, score the fat, stud it with cloves, cover with honey and mustard and bake it and present it on Sunday night for our New Year’s Eve Feast.

        https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b88b7a774b7134d8231ec1b83883ed79772ed50858fce12fbb4fe57c1e3fbcd0.jpg

    2. And then the justice,
      In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,
      With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
      Full of wise saws and modern instances;
      And so he plays his part.

      Our 7 lb capon gave us a delicious roast Christmas lunch for 3; coronation capon for 4 on 27th December; and a capon pie for 4 yesterday (with leftovers for the two of us when the guests have all gone) and a good quantity of stock.

      Capon is far better than turkey in my view.

      (I may not be a justice but I do have a round belly and side whiskers and a moustache rather than a beard of formal cut. However I do try to use quotations from English literature as my wise saws to illustrate modern instances!)

      3. I think several on here have reached or are reaching the seventh age:

        The sixth age shifts
        Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
        With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
        His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide
        For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
        Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
        And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
        That ends this strange eventful history,
        Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
        Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

  39. Don’t know what the Holy Father or the Reverend Mother will say about this…

    The Methodist Church of Great Britain Labels Terms ‘Husband’ and ‘Wife’ Offensive

    The Methodist Church of Great Britain has called on its ministers, deacons, and elders to stop using offensive terminology such as “husband” and “wife” to avoid making assumptions that are not “the reality for many people.”

    The church added the changes to its “Inclusive Language Guide,” an initiative aimed at preventing the use of “hurtful language” directed at groups the Methodist Church believes have been “marginalised and/or demonised by common culture.” The church plans to update the Inclusive Language Guide every six months to avoid using language that could offend groups it perceives as marginalized.

    https://twitter.com/calvinrobinson/status/1740423602120622189?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1740423602120622189%7Ctwgr%5E165faabfeb4e7dcdd707e5fdd38ad06bcfd48675%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.breitbart.com%2Ffaith%2F2023%2F12%2F28%2Fthe-methodist-church-of-great-britain-labels-terms-husband-and-wife-offensive%2F
    *
    *
    https://www.breitbart.com/faith/2023/12/28/the-methodist-church-of-great-britain-labels-terms-husband-and-wife-offensive/

    2. ‘to avoid making assumptions that are not “the reality for many people.”’- surely such assumptions are indeed the reality for the majority – once again we are pandering to a minority?

      1. It’s already come to a methodist church not far from me; the new minister declared that same sex marriages were fine – and in the process lost at least half the congregation and most of the ruling council.

    5. If you are a bit of a rebel, join the Congregationalist church.

      There is not an form that I have come across, with a big enough box for you to write it in.

    7. The Methodist Church of Great Britain Labels Terms ‘Husband’ and ‘Wife’ Offensive.

      I find Methodists offensive. From now on i shall call them dickheads.

    8. I find the fact that these people deem the terms ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ offensive extremely offensive, in fact, off-the-chart offensive and if I were a Methodist I would cease to be such, pronto.

  40. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/12/29/silicon-valley-data-centres-global-water-crisis/

    The article discusses the use of water for cooling servers and that this will cause a water shortage. Now, I don’t like to tell folk this but most data centers are air cooled. water cooling is relatively new (it’s been done, but it’s quite a new thing). These are mostly closed loops, recycling the water – if water is used at all. Sometimes it’s mineral oil.

    They don’t sit there having a river pour through them every day and then that water evaporates to nothing.

    In addition, some data centers are being clever and pushing the heat into turbines to produce energy for the datacenter or the local town. Sometimes the water heat is sent to homes and businesses for heating. Once the water is at temperature it’s going to stay that way.

    This terror people have of AI should only apply to pointless bureaucracy like government which should be afraid because true AI will end the corruption, fraud and theft of the useless, bloated state.

    1. Water shortage seems to be the latest chapter of Project Fear. The stuff falls from the sky. At worst, a bucket and decent filter needed.

      2. The biggest problem is pollution and water cleaning. As big fat state is trying desperately to shut down all form of energy while making the population twice what it was eventually we simply won’t be able to clean our water at all.

      3. Good evening Sue,
        Just back from an afternoon with daughter and family and son and family, 9 of us altogether.
        Anyway we watched a film last night ‘The last letter from your lover’ and part of it took place in Postman’s Park, Little Britain. I recognised the name and looked it up. It’s where vw and I did some of our courting back in the mid 60s. I’m sure you must know as it’s very close to St Bartholomews. The attached link has some very interesting information.
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postman%27s_Park

        1. Yes! Little Britain is where Benjamin Franklin lived when he was apprenticed to a printing workshop in the Lady Chapel at Barts.

    2. I read the article too. The first thing that struck me is why can’t they just install condensation plates to capture the vapour and change it back to liquid form.

    3. Closed circuit cooling uses close to zero water daily. You need to control cleanliness and O2 content, so you don’t tip the stuff down the drain!

  42. When I say it’s dry here in Bournville now, what I really mean is that “it’s not raining yet, but it’s almost certain to start within 5 minutes of you stepping out the front door”.

    Ps I sure as hell would like to see the rainfall and sunshine hours for Birmingham in 2023.

  43. Truism for today:

    In enterprise and business the cream usually rises to the top; in politics the scum almost always does.

  44. SIR – Junior doctors are striking for the wrong reason. Ever since the NHS adopted a slavish adherence to the European Working Time Directive, the system of training has been destroyed. Surgery in particular is a manual skill. It cannot be learnt from a book and requires a long apprenticeship to a master. Now, much time is spent on shift patterns and short attachments – which are not fit for purpose.

    I was paid far less in real terms when I was a junior, but I learnt my trade.

    David Nunn FRCS
    West Malling, Kent

    Rarely discussed in the media…

    1. Some years ago, a miltiple-occurence daily, Nunn whined in the UK press.
      How does Nunn think the rest of us deal with it? Engineering requires years of mentored practice to get right too, but we didn’t whinge from our position of huge pay and priviledge, we just got on and organised ourselves accordingly.
      Nunn is an arse. Don’t listen to him farting in the press.

          2. That issue has jerked my chain since at least 1997. Every one else manages ok, but not the medics. Maybe if they stopped whining and started managing, as the rest of us have, they could make it work.
            And they need to mange. Last time SWMBO was at A&E, a sunday evening, the poor duty Dr had been working since Friday morning, and could barely stand.
            Call that world-class? Mistakes waiting to happen. WTD would help. Not whining.

          3. You’ve missed the point by a country mile. The abandonment of the old system because of the WTD effectively left the NHS short of doctors. It was a failure of government and management. Twenty years on matters have not improved. The country is not training any more doctors per capita, UK-born applicants are overlooked and foreign doctors of questionable ability are hired instead.

          6. Gosh – you have along wait…. Have a shufti at the mini Rijks Museum – always worth a look.

          7. Despite being stationed in the Netherlands (Maastricht) I had never been to Amsterdam until I stumbled across the Rijksmuseum room at Schiphol during a long wait on work travel. Only then did I decide that I would one day see the real Rijksmuseum for itself. I went for 3 nights the next year and was immediately hooked, I’ve been back many times since.

      3. Doctors train to practise everybody would agree
        But I would rather not have doctors practising on me.

        From lyrics of Peter Christie – a member of that brilliant cabaret group called Instant Sunshine. This group was made up of three doctors and Miles Kington, a journalist.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3nTjCcBGUQ

    2. Some years ago, a miltiple-occurence daily, Nunn whined in the UK press.
      How does Nunn think the rest of us deal with it? Engineering requires years of mentored practice to get right too, but we didn’t whinge from our position of huge pay and priviledge, we just got on and organised ourselves accordingly.
      Nunn is an arse. Don’t listen to hid farting in the press.

    4. What Junior Docs ignore is that in a short time they’ll be earning six figure salaries from private patient care. They will far and away exceed the earnings of most people. Demanding those same people pay more to keep them now is offensive when they can afford so little.

      1. I remember one of the doctors in line at the first strike being spoken to regarding the reason for the strike. He said he was apparently happy with his pay, because like many hundreds of doctors we have in the NHS now. And nurses have come to the UK from many different forgien countries.
        Noticeably no others were asked the same question.

  45. Bastard day at work? Boss giving you a hard time? Still, could be worse eh?

    S.S. Ingerfem.

    Complement:
    41 (40 dead and 1 survivor).
    Ballast

    At 23.56 hours on 29th December 1942 the Ingerfem (Master Johan Johnsen) was hit by one torpedo from U-631 (Jürgen Krueger) amidships. The ship had been in convoy ONS-156, but had engine problems and lost the convoy after three days. Most crew members abandoned ship in two lifeboats, while the master, third mate and a gunner were seen struggling with a third lifeboat midships but before it was launched the ship broke in two and sank ten minutes after the hit. One of the lifeboats, carrying 33 men, was later lost.

    The other with eight men in it, also had problems in the bad weather, it was taking water and finally capsized three days later. All men got into it again, but the first mate and two crewmen died standing upright in the boat the same day. After one week, the boat had taken too much water and turned over again. The remaining men managed to right it, but that night four of them died, leaving the gunner Ole Næss (age 22) alone in the boat. He “buried” the dead in the sea, but it had all been too much for him and he jumped overboard, but a wave immediately washed him on board again. Then he drank large amounts of seawater in an attempt to end his life, but that did not succeed either. On 11th January, the lifeboat was spotted about 500 miles west of Scotland by the American steam merchant Staghound. The sole survivor was then unconscious and could not be straightened out so he was lifted in sitting position onto the vessel, where the doctor on board gave him the best care possible, until he could be taken to the hospital in Ards District near Belfast two days later, suffering from severe shock and salt water sores. He was nursed back to health again, though his legs for a long time were threatened by gangrene, but he was spared from amputation.

    Type VIIC U-Boat U-631 was sunk on 17th October 1943 in the North Atlantic south-east of Cape Farewell, Greenland by depth charges from the British corvette HMS Sunflower. 54 dead (all hands lost).

    https://uboat.net/media/allies/merchants/nw/ingerfem.jpg

  46. Phew! That’s the logs up the “garden” all sawn, chopped and either stacked or waiting to be stacked when Grad. Son’s headache has subsided.
    Now got some dinner on, using up the last of the Christmas Leftovers, and am sat with a mug of tea feeling totally knackered!

  47. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/12/29/crap-parents-struggling-children-tory-mp-james-daly/

    About El MP who said the parents were to blame. It’s quite surprising actually. I imagine he’ll disappear tomorrow. However he is right. A child is the sole responsibility of the parents. Big government has tried repeatedly to destroy the family yet that continued assault has given us the carnage we have today. Unemployment, low skills, joblessness, debt, mass welfare.

    The Left are interesting in that they keep fighting these basic truths, demanding more money be given to parents yet ignoring that that is the problem. They don’t seem able or willing to look at reality, simply finding excuses and irrelevant edge cases to fight a failed argument.

    2. Their brains are wired in a fundamentally different way from ours. They’re tribal and see everything in terms of clans and arbitrary right and wrong. Arguing facts with such people is a waste of energy. They’re incapable of reason.

      And you’re correct, that MP will no doubt be thrown to the wolves, unless he apologises for speaking truth…

  49. The desire for perfection in human relations is a powerful stimulant of conflict—and of a bureaucracy to adjudicate it. That all should be fair, open, above board, that no one should ever experience discomfort because of what someone else says, that each should be shown equal signs or marks of respect, that no one should feel left out of anything, is an impossible pipe dream, as the most minimal reflection on experience should make evident.

    https://www.takimag.com/article/broken-codes-of-conduct/

    1. The great Theodore Dalrymple.

      When I was much younger that I am now I used to see things in the world and think, that cannot be right surely? I didn’t say anything (this was before the internet) because no one else did. I just assumed that I was ill informed or maybe missing something. Then one day I read an article by Mr Dalrymple and realised that there were at least two of us. I bought his books and read them. Truth shone from their pages. They were eye openers. I noted that though he was an expert on prisons and their inmates. No one in government ever called for his opinion. It would have been too disturbing. So it is now. Lies predominate in the world.

      1. I generally find his articles thought-provoking. He has an enormous amount of “life experience” in areas where most of us won’t.

    2. PWS – Perfect World Syndrome. Nothing shall go wrong (if it does, the Far Right is to be blamed).

    1. Almost as bad as the case we had in Ontario about a month ago where swimmers were able to self declare their gender and age. Which is how a 50 year old man was able to enter a competition as a 15 year old girl.

      Swimming Canada could see no problem with this.

      1. “Mummy mummy, why do they let that man swim against us?”
        Because that’s not really a man, it’s a cunt, with a penis

    2. All those competing in female sporting competitions should have wombs rather than willies.

      WILLIES OR WOOMIES

      should be one of the defining tests.

      This article says that several Park Run women’s records have been won by trans runners. How many of these record holders still had male accoutrements?

    1. An elderly lady was asking a young girl of about ten years old, why she was digging a hole in her back garden. The girl replied I’m burying my gold fish.
      The elderly lady said that’s rather a large hole for a gold fish dear.
      That’s because it’s in your cat.

  52. Away in a bit to pick a friend up from Heathrow so I’ll leave you with a perfect example of the Evil Corrupt British Empire

    https://twitter.com/AndreasKoureas_/status/1740684636634652749

    Shame on us for interfering in East African free trade………….

    Few bits and pieces

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/42f68cdbbbbc770816481d5ef2ea38be8464590641e7008f195171514e2de42e.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/25255f9880bc571cb16dc0339a339fafa52144b4a84b975c7de0bb1ee1deea96.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c08d6f44fc9e4bd80cd1e53c41723fab5674dabd912fd1bb2ca80f7a1d36cc0a.jpg

    https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/155/641/391/original/450c50567dbff150.jpeg

    http://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/500ebc0ee69cb6d5e4d798c12bdf08a5ea0df091a21b4177564c7c9c99f2bf24.jpg

  54. I am off. Lazy day. No promised sun – apart from five minutes just before it went down. Put in a few pieces of jigsaw. Did the crosswords and Sudoku. Read a bit more Richard Ford (I a trying to make it last and limit myself to a few pages a day!

    Have a jolly evening.

    A demain.

  55. Just when everything seemed OK. Flushed the loo and the handle came off. Also it filled with warm water. Got an emergency plumber coming in the morning. It’s going to cost a fortune.

      1. The flow stopped. Just can’t flush it again. Don’t have a bucket either so will use the washing up bowl!

    3. Warm water? Sounds like simply the cold water pipe is touching/adjacent to a hot pipe somewhere very nearby. Is it possible to depress/push down the float which should open an inlet valve which would refill the cistern? You should be able to flush by pulling up the flush valve, by hand. Plenty of explanatory diagrams on the web.

  56. As I posted earlier I’m suffering with noro virus. Getting better slowly but I’ve been in bed all day and I feel very tired and can’t stop yawning.
    The problem of doing nothing all day.

      1. Thanks Elie.🙂
        I’ve recently eaten a slice of toast with a cuppa.
        All still where it landed.

    2. With no functioning toilet, diarrhoea would be my worst nightmare at the moment. Hope you’re feeling better soon.

  57. https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/one-person-dies-food-poisoning-28363355?utm_source=yorkshire_live_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Yorkshire+Live+-+Daily+Newsletter_newsletter&utm_content=&utm_term=&ruid=3ccd04d3-c548-4dd3-922a-a448f24fd581
    Here’s a bit of sad news for Johnny Norfolk. One of our favourite English cheeses, the multi-award-winning Mrs Kirkham’s wonderful farmhouse Lancashire, is in the midst of an outbreak of eColi that has killed a young chap by food poisoning. I hope they get to the bottom of what has caused it.

    1. My immediate sympathies (apart from to those affected) went to the producers.
      I hope that if there is a problem, that it is within the supermarkets’ end and that the producers are found to be producing quality cheeses in the best of conditions.

    2. Without wishing to appear to be flippant (I’m not trying to be), it was bad enough when Clarrie Grundy got caught up in an e-coli plot line in The Archers several years ago (and nobody died then)(and some say The Archers isn’t real).

  58. ‘Britain sends ‘hundreds of air defence missiles’ to Ukraine after Russian bombings.’

    I wasn’t aware that we actually had hundreds of missiles left. Well, we certainly don’t now! Will there be anything at all left in the cupboard after we’ve gifted it all to Ukraine?

    1. Grant Shapps should stop wasting our dwindling resources in the Black Hole of Ukraine.

      The regime installed in 2014 is illegal and has wrecked any possibility of Ukraine remaining an independent country. Ukraine is now lost yet the idiots in Washington and Westminster have no reverse gear and so persist in this madness.

      1. The West isn’t reacting to the situation, it’s blindly enacting its own ideology, regardless. It’s no surprise that governments are so out of touch with their own countries and electorates. It’s the same attitude.

  59. Hello all ,

    Sorry my appearance on here has been erratic .

    I am trying to come to grips with a new laptop.

    I am still using my old one at the moment , and am terrified of losing passwords etc when I switch and fiddle around .

    1. I’m getting to grips with my new one too. Younger son (who is 50 today) set it up for me and transferred all my files over. I use keypass to manage all my passwords – he transferred that over for me. It’s a bit different to use, but I’m getting there.

  60. Hello all ,

    Sorry my appearance on here has been erratic .

    I am trying to come to grips with a new laptop.

    I am still using my old one at the moment , and am terrified of losing passwords etc when I switch and fiddle around .

  61. David Starkey has had much to say in recent times about the problems of the country. The party system, bureaucracy, the civil service, quangos, quasi-constitutional legislation and judge-made law feature frequently. So what are we to make of this:

    Tudor historian David Starkey was still enthusing about observing the contributions from Tory MPs from the Speaker’s gallery in the Commons during the tense second reading of the Rwanda Bill when I bumped into him last week.

    “I was watching the future leader of the Tory party,” he said. Who’s that, I asked with some interest. “Robert Jenrick,” Starkey replied. “He gave the best speech I have heard on the House of Commons for years and years and years. It was brilliant.”

    Jenrick, who quit as Immigration minister over the Rwanda plan, has noticeably lost weight in recent months and has a new “Caesar” hair cut. Perhaps I should add him to the list of those wanting to succeed Rishi Sunak?

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/12/29/wizzards-brexit-disappointment/

    Jenrick, The Man of Many Houses, has been too keen to relax planning law and tried to overrule Westminster City Council’s refusal to grant permission for the Holocaust memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens. However, he did approve of the application for the Cumbrian coking coalmine. He has also talked tough on immigration and is a member of the Parliamentary Conservative Friends of Israel group.

    I’m not sure I care for him and I think Starkey must have exercised the corkscrew rather early that day.

    1. All I know about Commons speeches is that those who give exceptionally good ones are less likely to become party leader in this day and age. The last Prime Minister we had capable of giving a memorable speech was Margaret Thatcher. Mind you, that was more the case after she became PM rather than beforehand.

  62. Can the Beeb sink lower? They know that they have been involved in something criminal but what really matters in the eyes of The Great British Public is that they mucked about with Saint Diana. I suspect that they are going to pay heavily for Bashir’s Paki sleaze. It will be far more costly to their freedom to operate with relentless Lefty impunity and could be the ‘Beginning of the End.’

    BBC to redact hundreds of emails in Martin Bashir scandal having been ordered to release them

    Corporation has spent more than £100,000 in legal fees in bid to keep information about controversial Princess Diana interview secret

    Anita Singh, ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR
    29 December 2023 • 6:16pm

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2023/12/29/TELEMMGLPICT000259154607_17038723625930_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqgsaO8O78rhmZrDxTlQBjdLdu0TL-Cg_AMOUqySXmFgU.jpeg?imwidth=680
    Martin Bashir conducted the famous interview with Princess Diana in 1995, but has since been found to have used deception to secure it CREDIT: AP/Nick Wass

    The BBC is to redact hundreds of emails relating to its handling of the Martin Bashir scandal after a judge ordered that they be handed over.

    The corporation intends to use the Freedom of Information Act to prevent full disclosure in the case.

    It has already spent more than £100,000 in legal fees in a bid to keep secret information relating to the controversial Panorama interview which Bashir conducted with Diana, Princess of Wales in 1995.

    Earlier this month, a judge ordered that emails about the interview – numbering around 3,200 – be released. Andrew Webb, a documentary maker, has spent two-and-a-half years fighting for them to be made public.

    Judge Brian Kennedy KC, overseeing the tribunal, said that the BBC had been “inconsistent, erroneous and unreliable” in the way it dealt with the initial request.

    At an information rights tribunal hearing on Friday, lawyers for the BBC said that “a huge amount of work” had been put into reviewing the material and the broadcaster was “very, very anxious” to avoid appealing the judge’s decision.

    But Jason Pobjoy, representing the BBC, said that redactions would be made primarily under section 42 of the Freedom of Information Act, which concerns the disclosure of legally privileged information.

    Other exemptions would be sought in relation to a bundle of around 400 emails in which a “significant number” contained “third-party personal data” such as email addresses and phone numbers.

    “This is not giving us free rein just to redact without consequence. [The BBC is] only claiming where there is a legitimate exemption that applies,” Mr Pobjoy said.

    Mr Webb told the hearing: “I have been waiting two-and-a-half years for these documents.

    “We have been told this whole mass of data was initially meaningless, irrelevant and nothing to do with a cover-up, etc. The BBC has been fairly forcefully told that is not good enough.”

    A 2021 inquiry by Lord Dyson concluded that Mr Bashir had used deception to secure the interview and then lied to his managers at the BBC.

    The journalist has produced fake bank statements, which he showed to Earl Spencer, falsely suggesting that people were being paid to keep the princess under surveillance.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2023/12/29/TELEMMGLPICT000252474574_17038731840990_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqhfHey1W97a_hldDHyDVE6nGTJFJS74MYhNY6w3GNbO8.jpeg?imwidth=960
    A 2021 inquiry by Lord Dyson concluded that Mr Bashir had used deception to secure the Panorama interview with Princess Diana

    Lord Hall of Birkenhead, then head of news and later the BBC’s director-general, told the board of governors in 1996 that Mr Bashir was “an honest man”.

    Earl Spencer, however, has claimed that senior figures at the corporation later sought to cover up details about who knew what and when.

    When the scandal broke in 2020, the BBC said that Mr Bashir was on sick leave and too ill to respond to claims. He was then photographed collecting a takeaway.

    Earl Spencer recently told BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House programme: “I was told when I approached the BBC management at that time that there was no way we could talk to Martin Bashir, he was too ill to talk… but we know there are 38 emails between Bashir and senior people at the BBC at this time.”

    The BBC must submit the documents by January 24. Mr Webb can challenge any of the redactions if he wishes and, if he does so, the tribunal will be able to access the unredacted emails when coming to a decision on whether or not they should be disclosed in full.

    The case was adjourned to a date to be fixed.

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

    Robert Robert
    1 HR AGO
    The BBC would be apoplectic if it were the government similarly refusing transparency. What hypocrites.
    Then there is the issue of hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money used to ensure their secrets remain secret…and not for the first time.
    The BBC is arrogant and corrupt.

    Aberrant Apostrophe
    1 HR AGO
    Ah yes the old Guinness defence strategy. Feign an illness to avoid questions and then make a miraculous recovery when it all blows over.

    Celia Molestrangler
    53 MIN AGO
    How can it be permissible to redact something they’ve been ordered to release? Sums up the arrogance of the BBC that they even think of it.

    1. As with the Balen Report, the more the BBC spends to keep something quiet, the less the public believes it.

  64. We had the 50th birthday dinner this evening. I overcooked the beef a bit but it was still pink, just. Also roasty spuds, parsnips, carrots, cauli and broccoli. Started with some nibbly olive bits and bobs. The ‘boys’ finished with cheese, J & I had remains of the Christmas pudding. Hard to believe my sons are both in their 50s now.

    1. Sounds lovely. I dont get together with my two children so often but we are on good terms which is a blessing and I often go skiing with my daughter. However, I still have another two step children mainly at home.

      1. I don’t see a lot of mine although the elder one went to a couple of funerals during the year so called in then. Younger one is staying for a few more days.

          1. Ours are both living away. Miss them terribly. Fine young men, intelligent, skeptical, a real tribute to their mother.
            They don’t even booze much! sigh

          2. Ours are both living away. Miss them terribly. Fine young men, intelligent, skeptical, a real tribute to their mother.
            They don’t even booze much! sigh

    3. We were with our son, d-I-l , grandson and daughter, s-I-l and granddaughters. Son and daughter both in 50’s. We had a smashing time and a secret Santa limited to £10 and had to be purchased rom a charity shop.

  66. Still taking for ever to realign my passwords and other bits and pieces on my new laptop.

    My old one has a cracked screen and the letters have faded .. it was eight years old .

    1. My old one is 11 years old. The main problem with it was a lot of websites wouldn’t work. Some of the keys had worn off- especially e & t but that wasn’t too much of a problem.
      The new one is a bit different but while my son’s here he can sort out issues which are mostly when I’ve closed something and then can’t find it again.

  67. Took half an hour to shift the snow off the car, now on the last leg home. -5C, so not bad.

    1. Just a little nip in the air. Hang on, am I allowed to say that. Rejoice in getting away from the wet!

      1. And was it wet! -25C forecast for next week.
        Finally winter weather in winter… Hooda thunkit?

        1. Lucky you. Heavy rain and +4C here at the moment.

          It doesn’t get below -5C here next week and there is no snow in the forecast until about the tenth.

      1. Alopecia areata is a disease that causes hair loss, which often occurs on the scalp but can occur anywhere.ie Bolding

  69. A bit of a chillier day expected for tomorrow. It’s ½°C outside and a clear night, thought rain is forecast for the morning.

    And I’m off to bed.
    G’night all.

    1. Didn’t know most of those went in 23. Many, much older than I imagined – still have my poster of Raquel Welch somewhere, nipple poking shyly through her fabulous hair.
      How sad. RIP, all of them.
      :-((

  75. Night, all Y’all.
    Sleeping in one’s own bed next to one’s wife … Best feeling in the world!

    1. It is indeed, the best feeling…except for me it is in one’s own bed next to one’s husband…;-))
      Gad to see you are home. safe and sound!

  77. The authorities have finally named the person charged with murder in Sheffield after a man was run over whilst assisting a lady collapsed in the road. Not a particularly English sounding name as per usual.

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