An unofficial place to discuss the Telegraph letters, established when the DT website turned off its comments facility (now reinstated, but not as good as ours),
Intelligent, polite, good-humoured debate is welcome, whether on or off topic. Differing opinions are encouraged, but rudeness or personal attacks on other posters will not be tolerated. Posts which – in the opinion of the moderators – make this a less than cordial environment, are likely to be removed, without prior warning. Persistent offenders will be banned.
Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here.
Woohoo! First!
‘Morning all!
Morning, Sue!
:-D)
‘Morning Obers!
All well?
It’s been a stressful few weeks, managed some relaxation at the weekend, now difficult to get back into the saddle… big bowl of porridge works well, though!
It’s worse when you stop! Having run around like headless chickens for 3+ months, the old man and I were by ourselves (apart from dogs and cats) yesterday! By the time they came back, we were knackered with all the cleaning, clearing and cooking!
‘Morning Sue. Matthew, Chapter 20 v16 to you, m’dear!
But not if you read the comments ‘oldest first’! ‘Morning Hugh!
Oops! Extraneous ?
True!
Aren’t you in a different time zone? :@)
BST! Bitchy Sturgeon Time
Morning, Peeps.
At last in the DT…some AUKUS letters. Predictably, the writers seem to dislike little Macron!
Macron’s sour grapes
SIR – During the EU referendum, Emmanuel Macron – at that time the French economy minister – said that Brexit would make Britain “as significant as Guernsey”.
Now that we have left, and decided to join forces with the United States and Australia in establishing Aukus, French ministers are denouncing Britain as merely a lapdog of the United States.
The real reason for this insult, of course, is that the US and Australia clearly prefer our Guernsey-like country to France.
Mike Patterson
Camberley, Surrey
SIR – No wonder President Macron is displeased with our new pact. He can see the wisdom behind Brexit. This deal is great for defence and enhances our global standing.
Andrew Munday
Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex
SIR – How can the French be upset about our alliance with Australia and America to defend democracy in the Pacific region when they cannot be relied upon to control Calais beach?
Gerald Simpson
Chester
BTL comment:
Carolyn Bates
20 Sep 2021 6:04AM
I am at a loss to understand President Macron’s absurd attitude and arrogance as to the UK signing a contract with the US and Australia. What, exactly, has it got to do with him? Since when do we need French approval before entering into agreements with other countries?
The fact Australia decided against entering into such an agreement with France is also their prerogative, and just because Macron’s ego is hurt, it is hardly beneficial to future business with other countries to be having a massive tantrum and recalling Ambassadors.
For too long Macron has held ideas above his station and behaves in a manner unbecoming to a Western leader: why, it was not that long ago that he was threatening to cut off Jersey’s power supply because we would not allow French fishermen to steal our fish.
I just hope Marine La Pen gets him out of office before he is allowed to do anymore harm.
SIR – I would have more time for Dr Grahame Buss’s justification of his actions as a climate protester (Letters, September 18) if he and others directed their anger at those governments which, unlike ours, have not obliged themselves by law to reduce their countries to economic penury within 30 years. (Perhaps a superglued sit-in outside the Chinese Embassy would be in order.) Moreover, why he imagines that the planet will be saved once Britain has eliminated its 1 per cent contribution to the world’s carbon emissions is a mystery.
In the meantime, the disruption caused by the protests – some of which is literally endangering the lives of others – is self-defeating. The real issue is the disgraceful behaviour of those police who, rather than upholding the law, bend over backwards to facilitate the breaking of it. They and their indulgent superiors should be sacked.
Philip J Ashe
Leeds, West Yorkshire
SIR – Regarding Camilla Tominey’s article, there is another reason for the problem she identifies. Since the rebranding of the police as a “service”, the organisation has become, in all but name, part of the social services. Members have been steeped in this culture, while the courts have become more lenient towards the kind of behaviour we are seeing today. The police must return to being a force, whose duty is to uphold the Queen’s Peace.
Bob Tozer
Torbay, Devon
And so say all of us, Philip J Ashe!
“Moreover, why he imagines that the planet will be saved once Britain has eliminated its 1 per cent contribution to the world’s carbon emissions is a mystery.”
Same in Norway, with out 0.12% contribution versus China’s 29.8%…
This could be the moment the special relationship is rekindled if Boris and Biden can paper over the cracks. 20 September 2021.
It should be all smiles at the White House on Tuesday – Joe Biden and Boris Johnson have not traded barbs and animosity this year and are not expected to do so when they meet. But behind the warm rhetoric and handshakes lies a personal and political relationship that retains question marks next to it, not least over whether the two men are really that close.
Morning everyone. Oh God. The Special Relationship. Will it never die? It’s like the goddamned Hydra. Lop off one head and it grows five others. Biden has refused to open US borders to the UK. Refused a trade deal. Didn’t inform us about his Afghan pullout. Refused to speak to Boris about it when he called. Hates us on behalf of his non-existent Irish Ancestors and beside which he wouldn’t know Johnson from a leg of lamb! Special Relationship my ass!
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/09/19/could-moment-special-relationship-rekindled-boris-biden-can/
There has never been a special relationship, its just what America wants it gets. Remember the Iron Curtain. Suez. etc.
Your ass? Come, come, don’t you mean Biden’s ass? Over here we have arses. See Westminster for further information and ratification.
‘Biden has refused to open US borders to the UK’.
The U.S border with Mexico is wide open.
Yes, Biden hates us.
To tell the truth, Biden doesn’t know who we are or where we are. They probably told him we are aliens from outer space. We might as well be.
A repost of my early morning C&P:-
Satire. RIP.
From today’s DT…
(Meanwhile, I have just had a wizard idea – let’s develop our own independent energy policy. After all, we are sitting on enough to last for generations. What’s that? We are stuck with Johnson’s completely insane ‘net zero’ lunacy? Oh well, better stock up on blankets then…)
Government plans gas rescue package as a million families face energy bill price hike
Ministers held talks with energy suppliers amid fears smaller firms could collapse
By
Lucy Fisher,
DEPUTY POLITICAL EDITOR ;
James Titcomb
and
Ben Riley-Smith,
POLITICAL EDITOR
20 September 2021 • 12:40am
Ministers are preparing emergency support measures to tackle the mounting gas crisis as up to a million families face an energy bill price hike.
Energy companies are asking for a financial crisis-style government bailout, as four UK suppliers teeter on the brink of collapse following a surge in the wholesale price of natural gas across Europe.
Boris Johnson on Sunday night did not rule out the current gas shortage lasting for months as he blamed the problem on the demand boost from global economies coming out of lockdowns.
Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, on Sunday night acknowledged it was a “worrying time” for businesses and consumers. “We are working hard to manage the impact of global gas price rises,” he said.
He will host a round table on Monday with the energy industry and consumer groups, followed by meetings across Whitehall.
On Sunday, he held crunch talks with the chief executive of energy regulator Ofgem to discuss plans to protect the market and consumers. The pair discussed steps that could be taken to help ease pressures on smaller energy providers at risk of going bust.
Energy suppliers are calling for solutions such as government loans to cover the costs of taking on a large number of customers, or the creation of a state-backed body that would manage providers that collapse in the short term, it is understood.
The latter proposal would expose the Government to potentially millions of customer accounts depending on how many suppliers go under, and how many are seen as unprofitable by those that remain in the market. However, it could relieve stress on the market in the short-term.
Multiple options are believed to be on the table. Industry sources also suggested that VAT or green levies on energy bills could be frozen or reformed to ease the burden on prices. It may be difficult to suspend green levies as the revenue raised is used to support vulnerable and low income households.
Mr Kwarteng is understood to have received the proposals and will examine a range of ideas.
Four small energy suppliers have ceased to trade in recent weeks due to the sudden increase in global gas prices.
Another four smaller firms are now on the brink of collapse, sparking fears that up to a million households will face higher bills when their custom is transferred to other companies.
The Prime Minister likened the supply crunch to everyone “putting the kettle on” when a TV program ends, saying that “bottlenecks” could be seen across the world.
Mr Johnson told reporters: “Overall, as you know, the economy is now bouncing back very strongly. That’s producing its stresses and strains across the world.
“We’re experiencing bottlenecks in all kinds of things, huge stresses, as the world wakes up from Covid.
“It’s like everybody going back to put the kettle on at the end of a TV programme, you’re seeing huge stresses on the world supply systems.”
Separately, it emerged on Sunday night that Bulb, one of the largest challengers to the big providers, is on the hunt for an injection of new funding.
The loss-making renewable energy supplier, which has 1.7 million customers, has been working on raising funds from investors and exploring the possibility of merging with a rival.
It was among the energy firms in talks over gas prices with the Business Secretary over the weekend.
Many of the vulnerable suppliers offered cheaper tariffs in order to lure in customers. When a supplier goes bust, Ofgem runs a bidding process to move customers to a new company, but there is no obligation to match a household’s previous tariff.
The rising wholesale prices of energy in recent weeks have pushed up the cost of providing new tariffs, meaning families that are transferred are likely to be hit with higher bills.
Government sources on Sunday night confirmed that the energy price cap would remain in place to provide a level of protection to consumers.
Pessimistic estimates suggest that fewer than 10 companies could be left standing by the end of the year, down from 55.
If a back up supplier can not immediately be found to take on the customers of a collapsed firm, Kwasi Kwarteng said contingency plans provide for the Government to step in and appoint a special administrator to keep the failing company afloat temporarily to ensure continuity of supply to consumers.
Fears of return to 1970s ‘three-day week’
Clive Moffatt, a gas consultant and former adviser to the Government on energy security, warned prices for industry could go “through the roof”.
He warned some companies could “easily see a three-day working week” return this winter if the emergency worsens.
Energy-intensive sectors such as steel production, glass, ceramics and paper are among those most at risk from soaring energy costs. “We are working with energy-intensive industries to manage the energy cost increases,” said a government source.
Mr Kwarteng insisted on Sunday night he was “confident” that physical supply of gas could be maintained “under a wide range of scenarios”.
He met with Tony Will, global chief executive of CF Industries, a fertiliser firm that supplies up to 60 per cent of Britain’s carbon dioxide, which is crucial to meat processing, frozen food transportation and soft-drink manufacturing.
The company abruptly closed its plants in the north of England last week in response to the spiralling cost of natural gas.
Businesses have warned that dwindling supplies threaten a potential crisis within weeks, with meat disappearing from shelves in the run-up to Christmas.
The Industry body Energy UK said: “Given the unprecedented situation in the market, because of the high international gas price, it is absolutely the right thing for the Secretary of State to be meeting with industry to try to identify if more support is needed.”
The Confederation of British Industry called for ministers to step in with direct support to prevent further shutdowns.
A Bulb spokesperson said: “From time to time we explore various opportunities to fund our business plans… Like everyone in the industry, we’re monitoring wholesale prices and their impact on our business.”
Asked whether the problems could last for months, Mr Johnson said: “It could be faster than that, it could be much faster than that.”
But he added: “I think market forces will be very, very swift in sorting it out, and we’re going to do whatever we can to help.”
Elsewhere in the Prime Minister’s briefing with journalists during his flight to New York, where he is attending the UN General Assembly, he reached for another colourful metaphor.
Mr Johnson said: “On the current supply chain squeeze, it is fundamentally caused by the global economy coming to life again: the guy ropes are pinging off Gulliver and it’s standing up, and it’s going to take a while, as it were, for the circulation to adjust.”
No BTL comments permitted.
So why were these small suppliers trading on spot prices? Why did they not have forward contracts in place? Let them go bust, they are clearly useless!
What happens to those wholesalers who offered forward contracts a year ago, when during lockdown they could give their oil away, but now have to honour these cheap contracts at hugely inflated cost to them. Is it only a matter of time before those wholesalers who gave forward contracts go bust?
Why did no one think that this might happen? (I blame SID as the change to natural gas from town gas was the start of the slide into energy quicksand.)
The manager of the UK CF Industries site will have sent his report to CF HQ in the US. The CF management accountant will have suggested closing down until gas prices come back down, and that’s what they have done, without notice.
What exactly does our government do, if it does not protect strategic industries, such as energy, food production, food imports and exports?
In my opinion, the one actor who was a ‘comic’ actor was the least funny. But this does cover the current (ho ho) furore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR0lOtdvqyg
Let’s be fair to our government, who could have foreseen an energy shortage?
Downing Street’s green emperor has no clothes
Boris Johnson’s government is in denial over the crisis it has created
Melanie Phillips Sep 20
In a hole, Boris Johnson is still digging — oblivious to the toxic rubble he’s piling up in the process.
Off to the US to persuade the Biden administration to stop dragging its feet over “climate change” targets at next month’s COP 26 climate summit, Britain’s prime minister played down the chances of world leaders agreeing to a $100 billion fund to help the developing world “go green”. Said Johnson:
It’s going to be tough. But people need to understand that this is crucial for the world.
Ye gods! How can such an intelligent man be so bone-headedly…dumb?? It’s Boris Johnson who needs to understand that the policy he is promoting of Net Zero carbon emissions is leading his country and the world off the edge of an economic and social cliff.
In view of the energy crisis now consuming his government, what he should have said was: “I am tearing up Net Zero and putting our energy assumptions into sharp reverse”.
For while Boris Johnson is twisting other leaders’ arms to commit their countries to drastic reductions in CO₂ emissions, the irony of ironies — as I wrote here yesterday for my premium subscribers — is that Britain is now threatened with a terrible hit through having too little carbon dioxide.
Far from being a pollutant about to cause the end of Life As We know It, CO₂ is absolutely essential for fresh food packaging and the transport of frozen goods, as well as for stunning animals prior to slaughter; it’s also used by hospitals and the nuclear power industry, among others.
The immediate cause of the current crisis is that much CO₂ is made from fertiliser. However, soaring gas prices caused by gas shortages — the cost of natural gas shot up by no less than 800 per cent in August — have caused CF Fertilisers, the UK’s main fertiliser provider, to shut its plants, threatening to break the food supply chain and to empty supermarket shelves.
In addition, the price rises are forcing many small energy producers to go to the wall. In the Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reports Andrew Large, the outgoing chairman of the Energy Intensive Users Group, saying:
“It is potentially catastrophic. We’re already seeing plant closures at a time of year when the weather is still warm and domestic heating is low. Fast forward two months and this could be an acute crisis.
“CF Fertilisers have already stopped output and they account for 40pc to 60pc of the UK supply, which could have disastrous effects on the supply chain. The steel, cement, ceramics, glass, industrial chemicals, and the paper sector are all at risk. Individual companies are facing the very serious question of whether they can continue to operate.”
Gas futures contracts on the ICE exchange have risen fourfold over the last year to 165 pence per therm, while intraday electricity prices have become unhinged. Last week the National Grid was having to pay £4,000 per megawatt hour to secure back-up electricity at short notice.
The deeper cause of this crisis is that the obsession with reducing carbon emissions has turned renewables into a key component of energy supply. But the one thing about renewables upon which you can absolutely rely is that they are unreliable. When the wind drops, so does the power produced by wind turbines.
This is not rocket science.
Indeed, it’s what’s been taking place over the last few months in wind-becalmed Britain and much of Europe.
The British government assumed it could depend on gas to meet any such shortfall; and it also thought it could depend on interconnections to import electricity from Europe. It seems never to have occurred to these geniuses that if something went wrong with the gas supply or the interconnectors, Britain’s reliance on unreliable renewables might cause a crisis.
That’s precisely what’s now happened in a perfect storm. Gas supplies have been hit by a combination of things: increased demand as the economy recovers from Covid; the interconnector between Britain and France shutting down through a fire; and most important of all, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin playing malicious geopolitics by reducing gas supplies from Russia.
Yet Britain and much of Europe are now heavily dependent upon gas from Russia. And why is that? Because in a strategy of stupendous ideological idiocy and irresponsibility, they have deliberately been running down their own fossil fuel industries to reduce their countries’ carbon footprint.
As Paul Homewood writes on the Watts Up With That website:
Arguably the biggest factor this year has been the doubling of EU carbon prices, deliberately engineered by the EU to force fossil fuels out of the mix, in favour of renewable energy. UK carbon prices have followed suit.
As coal has the highest carbon footprint, this has encouraged the switch of generation from coal to dearer gas power, thus increasing demand for natural gas already in short supply. Both coal and gas generators have to pay this carbon price, forcing up their costs and consequently prices even further.
What Britain and the EU should have done to protect themselves from people like Putin was to boost their own gas infrastructure. As an exasperated Alex Brummer observes in the Mail:
The fact is that the UK is at the end of a very long pipeline, with supplies pretty much dependent on Putin’s whim. And yet we have an eco-minded government that, because of its determination to meet carbon targets, is determined to end our use of coal and reluctant to grant new oil-drilling licences, for instance, to firms wishing to further develop the Cambo oilfield near Shetland.
Other European nations, such as the Netherlands, have dealt with the Moscow threat by building huge storage capacity which can withstand months of disruption. In the UK our biggest storage at Rough off the coast of East Yorkshire was shut down in 2017 because of safety and leakage concerns.
The belief was that secure liquid natural gas supplies, arriving from Qatar, would ensure constant availability.That judgment has proved flawed. The surge in gas prices in August and September has been truly frightening and is why the fertiliser processor CF Industries — quoted on the Nasdaq stock market in the US — closed down its operations, strangling supplies of carbon dioxide for the food industry.
The result of the obsession with reducing carbon is that Britain’s energy supplies have no resilience against shocks resulting from natural or political challenges. And the result of that is a crisis which now threatens alike householders and big energy users such as the steel industry with soaring increases in fuel prices which could trigger a catastrophic rise in inflation. Such a crisis threatens to slow down the recovery from Covid and cripple the opportunities for British competitiveness post-Brexit.
And all of this is the result of the west’s obsession with a theory of apocalyptic “climate change” caused by man-made global warming — a theory for which no reputable evidence exists, which has been created by dodgy computer modelling and which is based on the ludicrous premise that any policies can alter the course of the climate, the most complex, non-linear and chaotic system in the natural world.
Some of us have been saying all this for years. But even now, government ministers won’t be listening because those trying to inject some reality into this situation — however stellar the scientific reputation of some of them may be — have been well and truly marginalised as cranks and “climate deniers”.
The response to this crisis by most of the media and political class illustrates the problem. Alex Brummer aside, there are today virtually no voices in mainstream debate saying what needs to be said — that the green emperor in Downing Street has no clothes.
The political and intellectual class has been well and truly greenwashed. There have been more than three decades of unchallenged green propaganda in the schools. Years ago, the BBC tore up the basic rules of journalism by refusing to report the other side to man-made global warming theory at all. Its argument was that there was no reputable “other side” because “the science was settled” — in itself a statement of staggering scientific illiteracy, since in science nothing is ever settled.
And it seems that in Whitehall, where green group-think rules, no officials are telling ministers the inconvenient truth that they have set the country on the road to disaster.
As the Telegraph reports, Clive Moffatt, a gas consultant and former government adviser on energy security, noted that the UK has slashed its strategic gas storage to barely 1.7 per cent of annual demand by closing the Rough facility off the Yorkshire coast, subcontracting the costly task of storage to Germany and the Netherlands. Yet when in key meetings with British officials he warned that closing Rough was a dangerous decision, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy dug in its heels.
“They refused to listen and kept saying that we had diversity of supply: they misunderstood the responsiveness of liquefied natural gas to short-term shocks,” he said. “The Government has been playing dangerous games with the grid and has allowed a situation to develop that is outside their control. It’s terribly depressing.”
That’s surely the understatement of the week.
Downing Street’s green emperor has no clothes
Boris Johnson’s government is in denial over the crisis it has created
Melanie Phillips Sep 20
In a hole, Boris Johnson is still digging — oblivious to the toxic rubble he’s piling up in the process.
Off to the US to persuade the Biden administration to stop dragging its feet over “climate change” targets at next month’s COP 26 climate summit, Britain’s prime minister played down the chances of world leaders agreeing to a $100 billion fund to help the developing world “go green”. Said Johnson:
It’s going to be tough. But people need to understand that this is crucial for the world.
Ye gods! How can such an intelligent man be so bone-headedly…dumb?? It’s Boris Johnson who needs to understand that the policy he is promoting of Net Zero carbon emissions is leading his country and the world off the edge of an economic and social cliff.
In view of the energy crisis now consuming his government, what he should have said was: “I am tearing up Net Zero and putting our energy assumptions into sharp reverse”.
For while Boris Johnson is twisting other leaders’ arms to commit their countries to drastic reductions in CO₂ emissions, the irony of ironies — as I wrote here yesterday for my premium subscribers — is that Britain is now threatened with a terrible hit through having too little carbon dioxide.
Far from being a pollutant about to cause the end of Life As We know It, CO₂ is absolutely essential for fresh food packaging and the transport of frozen goods, as well as for stunning animals prior to slaughter; it’s also used by hospitals and the nuclear power industry, among others.
The immediate cause of the current crisis is that much CO₂ is made from fertiliser. However, soaring gas prices caused by gas shortages — the cost of natural gas shot up by no less than 800 per cent in August — have caused CF Fertilisers, the UK’s main fertiliser provider, to shut its plants, threatening to break the food supply chain and to empty supermarket shelves.
In addition, the price rises are forcing many small energy producers to go to the wall. In the Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reports Andrew Large, the outgoing chairman of the Energy Intensive Users Group, saying:
“It is potentially catastrophic. We’re already seeing plant closures at a time of year when the weather is still warm and domestic heating is low. Fast forward two months and this could be an acute crisis.
“CF Fertilisers have already stopped output and they account for 40pc to 60pc of the UK supply, which could have disastrous effects on the supply chain. The steel, cement, ceramics, glass, industrial chemicals, and the paper sector are all at risk. Individual companies are facing the very serious question of whether they can continue to operate.”
Gas futures contracts on the ICE exchange have risen fourfold over the last year to 165 pence per therm, while intraday electricity prices have become unhinged. Last week the National Grid was having to pay £4,000 per megawatt hour to secure back-up electricity at short notice.
The deeper cause of this crisis is that the obsession with reducing carbon emissions has turned renewables into a key component of energy supply. But the one thing about renewables upon which you can absolutely rely is that they are unreliable. When the wind drops, so does the power produced by wind turbines.
This is not rocket science.
Indeed, it’s what’s been taking place over the last few months in wind-becalmed Britain and much of Europe.
The British government assumed it could depend on gas to meet any such shortfall; and it also thought it could depend on interconnections to import electricity from Europe. It seems never to have occurred to these geniuses that if something went wrong with the gas supply or the interconnectors, Britain’s reliance on unreliable renewables might cause a crisis.
That’s precisely what’s now happened in a perfect storm. Gas supplies have been hit by a combination of things: increased demand as the economy recovers from Covid; the interconnector between Britain and France shutting down through a fire; and most important of all, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin playing malicious geopolitics by reducing gas supplies from Russia.
Yet Britain and much of Europe are now heavily dependent upon gas from Russia. And why is that? Because in a strategy of stupendous ideological idiocy and irresponsibility, they have deliberately been running down their own fossil fuel industries to reduce their countries’ carbon footprint.
As Paul Homewood writes on the Watts Up With That website:
Arguably the biggest factor this year has been the doubling of EU carbon prices, deliberately engineered by the EU to force fossil fuels out of the mix, in favour of renewable energy. UK carbon prices have followed suit.
As coal has the highest carbon footprint, this has encouraged the switch of generation from coal to dearer gas power, thus increasing demand for natural gas already in short supply. Both coal and gas generators have to pay this carbon price, forcing up their costs and consequently prices even further.
What Britain and the EU should have done to protect themselves from people like Putin was to boost their own gas infrastructure. As an exasperated Alex Brummer observes in the Mail:
The fact is that the UK is at the end of a very long pipeline, with supplies pretty much dependent on Putin’s whim. And yet we have an eco-minded government that, because of its determination to meet carbon targets, is determined to end our use of coal and reluctant to grant new oil-drilling licences, for instance, to firms wishing to further develop the Cambo oilfield near Shetland.
Other European nations, such as the Netherlands, have dealt with the Moscow threat by building huge storage capacity which can withstand months of disruption. In the UK our biggest storage at Rough off the coast of East Yorkshire was shut down in 2017 because of safety and leakage concerns.
The belief was that secure liquid natural gas supplies, arriving from Qatar, would ensure constant availability.That judgment has proved flawed. The surge in gas prices in August and September has been truly frightening and is why the fertiliser processor CF Industries — quoted on the Nasdaq stock market in the US — closed down its operations, strangling supplies of carbon dioxide for the food industry.
The result of the obsession with reducing carbon is that Britain’s energy supplies have no resilience against shocks resulting from natural or political challenges. And the result of that is a crisis which now threatens alike householders and big energy users such as the steel industry with soaring increases in fuel prices which could trigger a catastrophic rise in inflation. Such a crisis threatens to slow down the recovery from Covid and cripple the opportunities for British competitiveness post-Brexit.
And all of this is the result of the west’s obsession with a theory of apocalyptic “climate change” caused by man-made global warming — a theory for which no reputable evidence exists, which has been created by dodgy computer modelling and which is based on the ludicrous premise that any policies can alter the course of the climate, the most complex, non-linear and chaotic system in the natural world.
Some of us have been saying all this for years. But even now, government ministers won’t be listening because those trying to inject some reality into this situation — however stellar the scientific reputation of some of them may be — have been well and truly marginalised as cranks and “climate deniers”.
The response to this crisis by most of the media and political class illustrates the problem. Alex Brummer aside, there are today virtually no voices in mainstream debate saying what needs to be said — that the green emperor in Downing Street has no clothes.
The political and intellectual class has been well and truly greenwashed. There have been more than three decades of unchallenged green propaganda in the schools. Years ago, the BBC tore up the basic rules of journalism by refusing to report the other side to man-made global warming theory at all. Its argument was that there was no reputable “other side” because “the science was settled” — in itself a statement of staggering scientific illiteracy, since in science nothing is ever settled.
And it seems that in Whitehall, where green group-think rules, no officials are telling ministers the inconvenient truth that they have set the country on the road to disaster.
As the Telegraph reports, Clive Moffatt, a gas consultant and former government adviser on energy security, noted that the UK has slashed its strategic gas storage to barely 1.7 per cent of annual demand by closing the Rough facility off the Yorkshire coast, subcontracting the costly task of storage to Germany and the Netherlands. Yet when in key meetings with British officials he warned that closing Rough was a dangerous decision, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy dug in its heels.
“They refused to listen and kept saying that we had diversity of supply: they misunderstood the responsiveness of liquefied natural gas to short-term shocks,” he said. “The Government has been playing dangerous games with the grid and has allowed a situation to develop that is outside their control. It’s terribly depressing.”
That’s surely the understatement of the week.
Awake again after a couple of hours.
Clear sky at the moment with a consequent 5°C at the moment.
Bright 🌞and sunny here.
US flying Haitian immigrants back to Haiti in large numbers. Multiple flights daily to be made. Perhaps Biden can give Johnson some guidance on this matter on how to return our invaders to France. His other objective to get Biden to persuade other countries to reduce their carbon emissions is much less likely than Johnson’s 6 out of 10 possibility of achieving this as reported to journalists by Johnson on his flight to to the US.
I thought i read somewhere that Biden had quietly dropped those deportations.
Nationalisation of the UK’s energy seems inevitable now.
If the smaller companies are lost, the big survivors make a mockery of competition by ransoming the nation into huge Government subsidy to finance executive bonuses and dodgy cartel pricing. Nationalisation would not be cheap, and the service provided by a Government monopoly is notoriously bad, but it may end up cheaper and less worse than the alternative.
If it is a choice between Serco and the electricity and gas boards, then cast your mind back to the 2012 Olympics. Who ended up having to taken on the security after G4S failed to do the job they were paid to do?
Governments cannot run or control anything. Its the last thing we want.
Agreed, we are facing this situation and government policy up to now has only made it worse. Closing the Rough storage facility against advice to the contrary is just one example of government incompetence.
No they can’t, but the likes of Serco can’t either. The last thing we want is all we are given. Unless you have any idea of anything else.
Morning Jeremy. I doubt that it will be Nationalisation. It looks more to me like the creation of a globalist controlled Cartel
CEGB (remember them?) had diversity of supply and keeping the lights on as their strategy. Worked.
Indeed. I remember energy rationing during the miners’ strike of 1970 and again during the oil crisis of 1973. I doubt the free market (aka Serco) could administer this, or prevent a hyperinflationary scramble for what’s left.
‘Human swan’ paramotorist seriously injured and support staff member killed in accident. 20 September 2021.
Sacha Dench, who was attempting a world-first circumnavigation of mainland Britain to raise awareness about climate change, has been seriously injured after a paramotor accident in the western Highlands of Scotland.
Ms Dench had been dubbed the “human swan” as she attempted a 3,000-mile Round Britain Climate Challenge ahead of the Cop26 conference due to start on October 31.
Forgive me everyone!
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/09/20/human-swan-paramotorist-seriously-injured-support-staff-member/
I wonder if she got to see Swan Lake 😖
She did when she did her earlier trip to follow the migration. Was she shot down?
Flew into a wind turbine?
Did someone yell ‘duck’ and she replied “no, it’s a goo ….”
She took a swan dive.
Will she still be gobbing off about green energy or will she become a mute swan.
Please don’t tell me that you’re laughing, Minty! I’m shocked…shocked, I tell you!
You are forgiven, Minty. I cracked up as well.
p.s. What fuels paramotors?
It’s her swan song.
Oh dear! I’m going to Hell.
Good Morning, all
Clear skies
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2021/09/19/132blower20-9-21_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqqdjb-p7zzJOPNWzBBDV6FE0PBM-OMgZ95SXRPMk8vS4.jpg?imwidth=1260
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/imageserver/image/methode%2Ftimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2Fca355774-1969-11ec-904c-3b07d8edb6cf.jpg?crop=2722%2C1815%2C604%2C193&resize=900
It appears that those of us who recognise the fallacies and absurdities of the Global Warming/Climate Change/Climate EMERGENCY!! campaign have lost the battle and the country is going to suffer.
I’m seriously considering buying a large reserve supply of tinned goods and reducing my freezer reserve to a minimum.
Morning Bob, part of me hope the winter is long and hard with frequent power failures. It is the only way the absurd net zero policy will be abandoned, and if it takes the buffoon with it, all the better.
I’m just glad I’ve got enough firewood to last this and, probably, next winter as well as spare Calor Gas bottles for the small stove.
We have no gas supply here. We use oil and the wood burner. Must check the stock of candles.
There are about 650 buffoons needed to be removed, and that’s just the top layer.
Avoid reading the Mail Online, as it is just trying to depress its readers all the time.
They’ve blocked my access to the Comments Johnny!
and mine.
Morning all 7deg C this morning. Autumn is definitely on its way, get that heat pump installed says Boris.
5°C here this morning.
Haven’t checked here.
339065+ up ticks,
Morning Each,
You surely must know the answer to that one, if in doubt the brotherhood of the mosque will enlighten you.
Whats the water polo scores in the English Channel anyone know ?
https://twitter.com/Sozzinski/status/1439334470302240772
What sort of future?
Whom.
339065+ up ticks,
Afternoon T,
I do believe on this occasion the contents of the post to be of more importance.
Exit poll shows Vladimir Putin’s party winning less than half the vote in Russian parliamentary elections. 20 September 2021.
United Russia has posted worse-than-expected results despite widespread reports of voter suppression and intimidation tactics.
Voting in the elections concluded amid mounting reports of nationwide ballot stuffing and multiple voting. In the runup to the three-day vote, a countless number of Kremlin critics, including allies of Alexei Navalny, were barred from running for the State Duma.
If the Telegraph had devoted one tenth of this effort to Trump’s defenestration and the utterly corrupt campaign and election that saw Biden into office we could probably take it more seriously As usual there is no evidence to support the accusations or that even if true that they would have had any serious effect on the result.
PS. Congratulations to Vlad!
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/09/19/voting-russian-parliamentary-elections-draws-close-amid-growing/
Heavily edited, but Tw@ted
https://twitter.com/BeardedBob7282/status/1439842931188412426
My Russian friend, Mr Rashidski must have been working overtime…!!
Didn’t 48% of those who could be bothered vote for something five years ago?
Morning all
SIR – Dr Richard Vautrey, chairman of the British Medical Association’s general practitioners committee, says that GPs need more money to resume face-to-face appointments – something they accepted as normal practice before the pandemic.
Am I alone in wondering why?
Stephen Howey
Woodford Green, Essex
SIR – Anyone who provides any sort of service to the public will be familiar with Dr Myles Johnson’s complaint (Letters, September 17) that patients have “unrealistic expectations” of their GPs. It comes with the territory.
However, expecting to get an appointment to see a GP within a reasonable amount of time to discuss a worrying health matter should never be classified among them.
Fortunately, however, Dr Richard Vautrey has the remedy: 30 pieces of silver.
Allan G Jones
Rhuddlan, Denbighshire
SIR – What next – teachers demanding more money to stand in front of a class, or policemen wanting more to go out on the beat?
Tony Manning
Barton on Sea, Hampshire
SIR – As a former member of the BMA’s GP committee, I am ashamed that its current chair denies the suggestion that patients are receiving worse care due to the rise of telephone and video consultations.
The evidence – from the many letters you and others have published, and from coroners’ reports – is definitely to the contrary. I know of one person who has been unable to see his GP about a knee problem, and has had to go private; another needs a blood test, which has been cancelled; and when I telephoned my GP practice, I had the call cut off after holding on for 40 minutes.
The reports of a young girl who died of appendicitis after three telephone consultations are but the tip of the iceberg. GPs must resume face-to-face consultations. I do, however, agree that more needs to be done to increase the number of GPs available.
Dr Malcolm Freeth
Bournemouth, Dorset
SIR – Selecting medical students exclusively from those with the highest grades does not produce the right mix of doctors (Letters, September 17).
Advertisement
The selection criteria of my Scottish medical school in the early 1960s were very different, but they were effective. From an initial class of 94, only three dropped out (with health problems). The rest of us stayed the course, passed finals and qualified. We had started our studies with the intention of a career in medicine and the result was a mixture of academics, consultants and GPs who, with a few exceptions, pursued their careers full-time.
Times have admittedly changed, but something has gone wrong with the selection process for future doctors.
Dr C D E Morris
Walsall, Staffordshire
Well, Dr Morris, what was the ratio of foreign medical students to UK medical students in the 60s? What is that ratio now?
It seems that the entire public sector needs more to do the same job, whereas the private sector is being made to do more for much less.
I know where this ends – why does the state insist on pursuing this insane agenda?
339065+ up ticks,
Could it be another facet on the “cull” plague, the ONLY successful shot to combat that is to get shot of the political overseers.
https://twitter.com/BeardedBob7282/status/1439838058111807490
The Prime Minister likened the supply crunch to everyone “putting the kettle on” when a TV program ends, saying that “bottlenecks” could be seen across the world.
“Polly put the kettle on,
Polly put the kettle on,
Polly put the kettle on,
We’ll all have tea.
Sukey take it off again,
Sukey take it off again,
Sukey take it off again,
The gas won”t light!”
339065+ up ticks,
Morning AOE,
Shale we take the common sense route & save lives ?
Ironically we are sitting on massive reserves of high quality coal whilst we have the techology to use it to efficiently power our homes and industry and what’s more extract the CO2 that the world is desperately short of.
339065+ up ticks,
AOE,
But to follow that course would be seen as the lab/lib/con/green current supporter / voters coalition giving comfort to the enemy ( the decent peoples).
Among my bits & pieces for emergencies, candles, etc., are a cigarette lighter & paper spills for igniting the gas hob.
Good morning, all. Rained most of the night. Too wet, I fear, for my hoped for bonfire.
Good morning from a Saxon Queen with blooded axe and pursed longbow with sharpened arrows.
Rained all night here and very bleak.
Getting ready to go on holiday down to Dittisham in Devon on Friday
It looks as if waterproofs and wellingtons will be needed, yet we hope to catch the little boat across the River Dart to Greenways and have a cream tea ( huge Agatha Christie fan ).
Nice! Hope it keeps dry for you!
Thank you, I hope it’ll be not too wet as we’re not intending to use the car much and are hoping to use the boats along the river Dart often. Have lots of waterproof clothes,
anyway it’d not be England without rain and hardy souls.
Good morning. Beautifully clear here overnight.
After waking up to pump bilges at 01:45, I was not only sat down on here for an hour, but went for a 10 minute stroll up the road to savour the quiet morning and full moon.
The sounds of the stream running into the top of the mill pond coupled with the hooting of the tawny owls was exquisite.
Good morning. That sounds exquisitely enchanting, wonderful.
There is nothing more delightful then our rural areas, glistening streams and wildlife.
We have a owl near here that is very noisy atm .
Through the day, from about 06:00, it can get very noisy with passing HGV traffic, largely from the local quarries.
But there is a time of evening, around dusk at this time of year, when the traffic all but stops allowing one to soak up the quiet.
Those are the best of times when it’s quiet and you don’t hear the traffic,
that’s something I did like about lockdown, that it was quiet and you could hear the wildlife.
Syria after the fall of Kabul: A European perspective. 20 September 2021.
The risk, or rather, the situation in which we already find ourselves, is that the Russians and Syrian regime will further their objectives in the absence of a common strategy against Assad. As the Assad regime bypasses sanctions by transforming itself into a narco-state, the situation is slipping away from the American, European, and Gulf actors. And, if they remain divided, none will achieve their respective objectives. This consideration alone should spur them to reestablish close consultation and coordinated action in the spirit outlined above.
Furthermore, decision-makers must be reminded incessantly of this simple fact: if the Assad regime ultimately prevails, it will resume its habit of destabilizing the region, where terrorism will find fertile terrain for a new surge. There is at least one common factor between Syria and Afghanistan: just as the Taliban has not changed once it took back power, the Assad regime will not change once its power is affirmed.
Aside from the nine times that the words Assad Regime appear in the text of this article (which is a reliable indicator to its orientation) one is struck by the blatant nature of its lies. The last paragraph quoted above is a pretty good guide in the accusation about Syria being an aggressor and organiser of terrorism, when it was in fact the victim of terrorists, organised and supplied by the West and its proxies!
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/syria-after-the-fall-of-kabul-a-european-perspective/
“the Assad regime will not change once its power is affirmed.”
Yes Christians will be happily worshiping in Syrian Cathedrals just as they always have unlike the rest of the M,E
‘Morning Minty
A Tw@ter response:-
https://twitter.com/BeardedBob7282/status/1439856586080591874
‘Morning All
If Aus is the blueprint it’s time to gear up
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f466945631f637b7d3f6550891798dd0ba20fa9c7dc3a43268d5a962101fd0cf.jpg
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5b6f71ce1e282fcdfbd875fc04096169187accd6827308c0cc36385c4acad48f.jpg
Ah yes,the “Boot to the head” Public health approach
https://twitter.com/Justme29830113/status/1439697807384842242?s=20
TwitterMachFrei………or not…..
https://twitter.com/ToryRambo/status/1439610765791666176?s=20
The first Globalist controlled Fascist State! Morning Rik.
She’s died? Blimey.
One hopes that there will a huge lawsuit.
Somehow, I rather doubt it.
I doubt that there will even be an inquiry! Morning Bill.
I wonder if Sky Australia will mention it.
Good day to you, if it is a good day, which I doubt.
It’s the Stanford Experiment on a vast scale.
She has died? Holy smoke.
Given the disgusting behaviour of the Australian police throughout this plague, I thought it was a bit rich of the D Fail yesterday to describe some of the crowd who rounded on the Oz Stasi as “bullies”.
I think the police need to be reminded that they are outnumbered by the public and that we’re tired of their thuggery.
When they next kick off, we, the public restrain them.
Obviously the prison warders outbred the convicts.
Good morning, everyone.
Good morning Delboy.
Good morning.
‘allo, Ethel.
‘ere, where’s yer bow?
Its in the handbag, Mr Viking, one can’t be too careful these days l
Good morning Delboy .
I was right about no bonfire. Everything is sodden. Bugger.
How sodden awful for you.
Well, it is really. I enjoy a good bonfire. As I pile on the stuff to destroy I imagine each forkful is BPAPM, Shatts, Glove, Spamhead, the sex pest edjacashun bloke etc etc.
More to the point, if I DON’T have one today, there are no suitable north winds in the offing, and the pile will simply increase.
Never mind, it will rot down. Don’t forget to check for sleeping hedgehogs in the pile.
Throw a gallon of petrol over it…watch your eyebrows.
A lot safer with diesel or used engine oil.
As soon as one’s back is turned, that Allan woman is casting nasturtiums..,.
Steerpike
Four of the worst responses to the Aukus deal
19 September 2021, 12:39pm
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(long and boring article)
*
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Lamia • 17 hours ago
“As a number of military commentators have since noted, it should not come as a complete surprise to Élysée policy makers that Australia reneged on its original diesel submarine deal. French capability was poor, behind schedule and risked being obsolete within the next decade”
So, it’s perhaps not so much that Australia ‘reneged’ as that France sold a rip-off ‘deal’ – which by the way included France changing some of the terms of provision after it had been signed – i.e. reneging on its own promises.
The French were confident that they would make a big amount of money from belatedly providing junk, perhaps on the basis of the Australian government being guided by the Sunk Costs Fallacy. It didn’t work. Boo hoo.
anneallan Lamia • 16 hours ago
Like thinking you’ve ordered top of the range Jaguars and find you’re getting rusty 2 CVs.
Can’t be our Annie. The A Allan in the DT is a garrulous chap. {:¬))
A windbag, would you say?
A veritable Saudi Arabia of wind.
Far worse. Self-opinionated, dogmatic….{:¬))
Stop listing her good points.
Aaarrgghhhhh …… can’t a chapess even insult a tinny French car without being spotted?
Isn’t that the default for defence contracts?
#CovidClownWorld
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/291a384d0f62e86841b91763124bbe7f881ae44a0bdf0093c7d97c65c6913e0f.png
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b587f949443eb4f855ad9899f79c3b384c1f53923eca63071da87dd89302f827.jpg
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/085/460/781/original/32bbc8f43b7fe173.jpg
I doubt they care. Biden’s their man. The press are already attacking her and the wokists are lining up to insult, deride and abuse her.
Good Moaning.
I will start the week with a spot of conjecture.
How roomy is a police car?
“Two married police officers IGNORED call-outs to an assault and burglary to have sex in squad car: Bosses bugged vehicle over suspicions about affair”
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/034d71971b9aefe9cf8f1c9f7a4cc3bcd70e2e7013d5ca28cd0866d97e5f8482.jpg
Testing the super-strength heavy duty springs and suspension?
Were they animal handlers or was it just a case of police dogging?
” Bosses bugged vehicle over suspicions about affair”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1cjaheraq8
A pal of mine who was 6′ 5″ had it off with his girlfriend 6′ 1″ in a Messerschmitt bubble car with the hood closed…….me? Triumph Spitfire
Achtung!
Perhaps we should all confess to our , er tight moments ?
We could cheer our Monday morning up abit
Good morning FA.
Go on then…..
Good hanky panky morning !
You first
Good morning Phizzee.
In a hay stack. I wouldn’t recommend it. :@(
That’s the last straw
Morning Maggie – go on then!
I can recount a couple of occasions which would have you all laughing
Go on FA, do tell
I have all the time in the world , Moh is playing golf !
Errr ok – must stress these happened long before I met my late wife.
In the Spitfire in my lock-up garage in the middle of Bury St Edmunds, hood shut, her left leg out of the open window, right leg against the steering wheel, on the vinegar stroke her right foot slipped between the spokes of the steering wheel and she got cramp in the leg. She was screaming in pain which I’m sure could be heard in the surrounding houses – I had to extricate myself and get my tool kit from the boot to remove the steering wheel and thread it over her rigid leg.
A couple of years later, different lady, now living up north we were out for a run in the car one afternoon and both desperate for it. Thick fog had descended and we drove round in the countryside for a while until we thought we’d found a suitable parking spot. and got down to the business. Unnoticed by us while we were ‘at it’ the thick fog had cleared and we found I’d parked on this grass area in the middle of a circle of council houses and there were people passing us trying not to look in the car.
🤣🤣🤣😄😄
What a lad , lucky there was no such thing as Viagra in those days !!!
Didn’t need it – when I was a lad I needed two hands to bend it – now I can bend it with two fingers – the older I get the stronger I get!
😲😲😲
I had to read that through my fingers !
About 30 years ago, a friend and I were riding around Friday Woods, an Army training area. We noticed a car parked up and, given the high security alerts because of the IRA, we decided to check it out.
It soon became obvious that it wasn’t the IRA but a middle aged couple making good use of their lunch break.
As concerned citizens, we rode round the car several times just to make sure. As we rode round, we ‘discussed’ whether we should call the local or military police. Never before had I realised it was possible for grown adults to squeeze themselves under car seats.
Morris Minor……… MG Midget was a bit tight.
I daren’t say anything , Moh reads / stalks me on line !
A policeman knocked on the roof of the Morris……….. and said “Sorry sir – I thought the car was abandoned”.
You should have another pseudonym for private posting!
Morning Anne
I have just cleaned my glasses , I thought I was viewing two females!
🙂 Take your point.
I suppose we should be grateful they’re not wearing rainbow coloured tutus.
Rainbow romance?
Why were a married couple put on the same vehicle? Surely that’s dangerous for their professionalism – bonking aside, if one is injured the other isn’t going to be able to make a rational decision as regards the criminal.
Ah, what am I thinking. Plod don’t deal with criminals now.
I don’t think they were married to each other.
They weren’t married to each other.
I was on patrol one night in my panda car when I saw suspicious car headlight beams coming from a farmer’s field. I blocked the only gateway entrance to that field and waited for the vehicle to emerge over a mound. I was dumbfounded to see it was another panda car, from the next sub-division, being driven by an on-duty bobby, who had a young female civilian passenger sitting beside him.
His face was red with embarrassment as he saw me blocking his exit. I had a quiet word in his ear and advised him that if he wished to endanger his career and pension prospects then it would be prudent not to do so on my patch. He was also advised what would happen in the event of a recurrence. I had no clear evidence of what had obviously gone on before I arrived but he left with his (metaphorical) tail between his legs.
Enquiries I later made amongst his colleagues revealed him to be a serial philanderer.
Good morning all
We had a notification earlier on in the year about the disruption to coal supplies and how we should consider switching to smokeless fuel in our grate .
We now have a bunker full of house coal, and pray we don’t have a hard winter .
Mon 13 Sep 2021 19.40 BST
Owners of the UK’s last remaining coal power stations are in line to be paid record sums to keep the lights on as energy prices reach fresh highs, and could be pushed even higher by lower wind power.
Coal plants have been called on to supply power steadily in recent months, through one of the least windy summers on record since 1961 and sharply rising prices in the wholesale energy market.
The UK’s electricity system operator (ESO) spent more than £86m last week alone to keep the lights on, which involved making payments of up to £4,000 per megawatt-hour for fossil fuel power stations to generate electricity at short notice, including the West Burton plant in Nottinghamshire and a coal unit at the Drax site in North Yorkshire.
Britain has largely been weaned off coal power in recent years, but the remaining plants are available on standby to accept eye-watering offers from National Grid ESO in times of need, such as during cold spikes or low wind conditions . The Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal plant near Nottingham is also in line to benefit from record power prices this week.
The price of electricity on the UK’s main power auction rose above £400 per unit for the first time on Monday, while the price of gas surged to a record of 150p per therm.
The increases follow market highs last week. Experts predict that UK wholesale energy prices will climb higher in the days ahead owing to forecasts of low wind speeds, which will limit the country’s renewable energy generation.
The price of electricity during Tuesday evening’s peak power demand hours has reached a new record of £1,750 a MWh, more than 2,900% higher than the average price over the last decade, according to Bloomberg data.
Prices have soared in recent months owing to a global gas market surge, which followed a cold winter in the northern hemisphere that left gas storage facilities depleted. The record gas price has made electricity more expensive in the UK, where almost half of all electricity is generated in gas plants.
Sign up to the daily Business Today email or follow Guardian Business on Twitter at @BusinessDesk
In addition, the UK has faced a “perfect storm” of power plant outages and low wind speeds that has forced energy prices higher despite demand “not being very high at the moment”, according to Rajiv Gogna, a partner at LCP Energy Analytics.
Phil Hewitt, a director at the energy consultancy EnAppSys, added that Wednesday and Thursday looked even more volatile than the start of the week, “so we suspect that this is not the end of the high prices”.
The record market prices are expected to lead to hikes in household energy bills until 2022, plunging more than half a million people in the UK into fuel poverty for the first time and causing many small energy suppliers to go bust.
Clare Moriarty, the chief executive of Citizens Advice, said it was deeply concerning that energy prices were continuing to rise, “meaning we’re likely to see yet another hike in bills next year”.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/13/britain-last-coal-power-stations-to-be-paid-huge-sums-to-keep-lights-on-record-energy-prices
…one of the least windy summers on record since 1961 …
Not only could the world be suffering from a global CO2 shortage but also a global wind shortage.
Plenty of wind in Downing Street…
https://twitter.com/GreyER_13/status/1439850237087072258
Pay it back? We’ll never see a penny.
This is from 2018, I wonder how much has now been repaid.
A BTL
Simon Brown 20 Sep 2021 8:59AM
Off piste but….What is going on? We face empty shelves in the food shops, and other supply problems, an energy crisis that threatens to
turn off the lights, the highest taxes ever, a failing NHS, inflation, crazed green policies which contribute to all the above, a failing police force,
a failing education system, lousy roads, culture wars, unsustainable immigration, a resurgence of militant unions, arguments about weights and measures,
and a Royal Family in crisis too. Apart from the green policies it’s just like being back in the seventies. It makes me feel quite young.
Me #3
Bu88er. MB was rite. I shouldn’t have donated his loons to the charity shop.
My neice begged me to give her my beloved 1970 cullotte dress, the prettiest item of clothing that survived .. a reminder of party music as it was , T Rex etc ..
Damn , will have to stock up on batteries, candles , and more M+S thermals
Such was all obvious from the outset. The state likes this sort of chaos.
It’s funny. The Tories have created the very same situation their predecessor saved the country from.
This is the end result of Left wing, big state, high tax moronic policies.
The policies are right-wing policies, you just view them as ‘of the left’. Big state is a necessary evil, and it’s not as big as you think as many government services are actually done by the private sector. High tax policies are certainly moronic but that’s Tory ideology for you. They think they need to balance the books whatever the cost as most of them are insulated by wealth and they don’t have the brains to understand how wrong-headed their ideology is. High tax says consumers have too much money, they will cause the economy to overheat massively and cause high inflation so that extra money must be taken off them. So the economy is growing at well over 4% per year, maybe 5%? Is it feck. We’ve averaged about 1.3% per year since 2010 when our historic growth rate, the rate we’d like to be growing at ideally is 3.2%. Those losses compounded over an entire decade. We should be lowering taxes to the point that the economy reaches optimal growth. That’ll cause a deficit and we’ll need to educate people as to why that won’t be a problem instead of letting the MSM drive everyone into a debt/deficit frenzy again causing another lost decade or more.
Taxing the ‘High Earners’ just encourages them to either move away to another country or pay for bigger and better tax avoidance schemes, either way the tax revenue drops.
Economics 101
Too much emphasis is put on tax revenue.
We don’t tax so that the government has money to spend. We tax to destroy excess money in the economy. In other words amounts are only important to the bean counters. What’s really important is the effects. This is what so few people get.
We’ve just had a decade of austerity. We’ve sucked money out of the economy with a combination of higher taxes and lower real terms spending. Satisfactory to the bean counters. But have the effects been satisfactory? House prices increased and wages stayed flat or fell. Employment increased but a lot of it was self-employment and splitting full-time posts into multiple part-time posts. Many of these new jobs didn’t pay a lot. The benefits system when the 20 quid uplift is removed will be in real terms the same as 1989 yet back then your poll tax was covered entirely and your rent was fully paid. Now contributions for council tax and rent come out of your money. So 1989 levels is actually being quite generous with the truth, it’s more like 1977 levels with those contributions taken out. We’ve lost between 1.6 and 2% of prospective growth every year since 2010. These last three administrations have been a disaster doing more damage than Tony Blair could do in 40 years in power.
I do not understand how you can call spending 99p more instead of £1 more austerity. it is delusional. I appreciate people don’t understand it, but there have been absolutely no cuts in public spending. If there had been, the public sector debt and cost would have reduced. it’s grown. Debt up, deficit up, waste up, taxes up.
And yes, we do tax for government to spend money. If the government wanted to destroy the value of money it just keeps borrowing – and is doing so deliberately. That’s why real wealth is falling. House prices are rigged by massive government spending.
Every single thing is going the wrong way.
The best solution I can think of with welfare is what universal credit does – don’t take the money away. It’s disgusting. If we removed welfare fraud, we could lift the tax allowance to 25K. It’s that simple. If we then cut state spending by 6%, boom, there go the upper and higher rates.
Or, more sensibly, corporation tax. The idiocy is that government needs more money. It doesn’t. Government is unaffordably vast already. We need radical, brutal cuts. Find the first 5 levels of management and show them the door.
Every problem this country has could be solved by tax cuts. Big fat state should just be made to suck it up.
We were very much in austerity. Be thankful you earn enough and are secure enough that you didn’t much notice personally. Every department suffered cuts. Only a couple got increases and they were well below the increases they needed.
We absolutely do not tax for money to spend. I’ve explained this to you over and over. The economy would literally fall flat on its face and government cheques would bounce left, right and centre. The government also doesn’t borrow even though it looks like it does. Gilts aren’t a vehicle for borrowing, they are a vehicle for saving.
Yes we certainly need tax cuts, but we cant get rid of 95% of government, sorry. Government has all the money it needs unless you can do what postdoctorate economists and mathematicians couldn’t do and show how the UK can overspend from its budget of infinity pounds available.
We don’t tax to spend, we tax to mitigate the inflationary effects of spending, to alter behaviour, and most importantly to drive domestic demand for pounds.
Again you have everything ass about face.
No, you have everything arse about face.
Money that has no definitive value, that can be created out of thin air, drives down it’s own value and leads to soaring inflation.
Fiat money is a myth chasing a dream that will inevitably turn into a nightmare.
That nightmare is approaching rapidly.
Every single currency in the world is fiat. Your beloved Gold Standard doesn’t work, it just creates deflation and depressions.
There’s nothing wrong with fiat money, the problems come when politicians and electorates misunderstand how things really work so vote for things that would sound good for households but are actually bad for sovereign states.
You were wrong about the deficit, it was cut every year, not increasing by smaller amounts, which was the national debt, which just highlights how little you understand this.
Money is simply a token that facilitates exchange, it enables the economy. Some say it’s a store of wealth, it’s not it’s a record of wealth. The value of money goes up and down just as any commodity that is speculated on does. Value is perception based. How is money valued? Compared against the same currency in a previous time period? compared against another currency? a basket of other currencies? Or perhaps purchasing power, but purchasing of what?
Oh for God’s sake, the Fiat Money bullshite again!
Yup. As I have done.
I lived through the seventies – the brain drain was real.
They’re not remotely ‘Right wing’ policies. The very suggestion is comical.
Big state is unnecessary – Other far more efficient, lower tax, higher income countries do without such a wasteful bureaucracy.
This is NOT Conservative ideology. The last bunch who put us in this mess were Labour, it took a Conservative to sort it out.
High taxes have nothing to do with income except in reducing it. I honestly don’t understand this “High tax says consumers have too much money” at all. It makes no sense. it’s like Here’s a big table, I drive a car.
The economy is shrinking in real terms because of big state. Remove state spending and it’s an evaporating puddle under the Sahara sun.
We already have a deficit, we shouldn’t be reducing taxes – yet, we should be cutting spending until there is no deficit. *Then * we cut taxes radically, brutally.
People need educating in basic economics of supply and demand and where government money comes from.
Now this is where the labelling of “Fascism” as being somehow “Right Wing” falls apart & causes confusion.
True Right wing Conservatism is in favour of as small an amount of Government as possible.
True Conservatives believe in minimal taxation to support the essentials of Government and the citizen left to take personal responsibility regarding not only looking after himself and his family, but also to take responsibility for assisting and helping those less fortunate people who can not look after themselves.
A true Conservative recognises that there is need for emergency assistance to be available from The Authorities, funded by taxation, to assist those in distress, but believes that assistance should be limited in magnitude and duration.
A true Conservative sees little need for excessive Government interference in the personal lives of the Citizens of the country.
With it’s drive towards excessive State control, one trait amongst several that it shares with Marxism/Communism, Fascism is the very antithesis of true Right wing Conservative values.
The right wing is liberalism not conservatism.
A left-wing economy is one where the state holds the means of production as much as possible. A right-wing economy is one where the state has liberalised as much as possible. Conservatism simply says the state is a big household and must balance the books, and we like having a monarchy, and you can probably add liking of prohibiting things, and stiff sentences for crimes, but economically it just says treat the state as a household. Everything else you see as ‘conservatism’ is really known as ‘liberalism’.
Minimal taxation is a decent idea, I’ve never disagreed with that. But we don’t tax for money to spend. We tax to destroy money that was previously spent by money creation. This is what you don’t get, or refuse to even understand. Spending comes first and gives us the money to pay taxation in aggregate although individual circumstances vary.
Excessive state control is authoritarianism and this occurs across the political spectrum. It’s opposite is libertarianism. The Tory party has been authoritarian actually since it’s inception. It has never believed in libertarianism.
For a long time I have said that I’m reliving the seventies – when I don’t feel as though government is busy recreating the thirties.
Some of the world’s richest, ugliest people gathered in Los Angeles to out-dress one another and sneer at their misfortunes whilst dishing out ‘prizes’ for being better on the casting couch than the rest. This year’s winners are listed in all the papers but this couple should surely have taken top spot in most, if not all, of the ‘Woke’ categories:
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/09/19/23/48118811-10007213-image-a-18_1632092325423.jpg
Looking good: Samira Wiley and wife Lauren Morelli coordinate in patterned looks. D Fail Which is which? Is he/she/it carrying the wife’s purse – or is she/he/it the wife? I am confused.
Passing quickly onto a subject other than the Decline and Fall of the West ……
How irredeemably grim
Is it the black & white munter show?
Where are their husbands?
They are husmoo and manoo. They actually have a child – married on March 25, 2017, Muz Morelli gave birth to their daughter, George Elizabeth, on April 11, 2021.
Does that mean the daughter is non-binary?
And where did it come from? Is the ‘thing’ on the right really a bloke wearing lipstick and half a guardsman’s bearskin?
Tesco.
Testubo?
Baster
Wiley is the one on the right, the one with the dog on her/err/its head. Her parents were co-pastors of Covenant Baptist United Church of Christ, Washington DC – regarded as “pillars of the LGBT religious community’.
“
pillarspillocks of the LGBT religious community”Well,fuck me…{:¬)
!!!!! George Elizabeth? What on Earth …..
I wonder which of them provided the spermatozoon?
Is that the American ‘purse’, known in the UK as a handbag?
No, it is too small to be a haaandbaaag! (Lady Bracknell)
Purse (n.)
Middle English purs, purse, from Old English pursa “little bag or pouch made of leather.”
The Yanks can call it whatever they want – they don’t speak English.
My Welsh mother always referred to scrotum as a purse.
They don’t spell it properly either. I blame the retarded halfwit, Noah Webster.
Tw@ted:-
https://twitter.com/BeardedBob7282/status/1439963076464349188
Insulate Britain out at Junction 18 on M25 this morning trying to block traffic. Police held up in the traffic jam but now dragging drivers away from the demonstrators and trying to stop the protest.
Good morning Clydesider
We have to really question what exactly is the purpose of the police ?
Why are they poncing around in the safety of their yellow and blue cars ?
Yellow and blue? Tut, tut, Mags you are well out of date. Rainbow cars – perleese.
I was about to say because the pink, glittery ones were not available, but Uncle Bill had a similar thought.
they should be clearing the road for the motorists.
It comes as church leaders slammed two priests – Rev Tim Hewes (left) and Rev Sue Parfitt (right) – who were among protesters who glued themselves to sliproads around the M25
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10008103/Eco-mob-block-M25-7am-TODAY.html
Pure evil…
Tony Blair: Govt Should Vaccinate ‘Nursery’ Age Children and Impose Vax Passes to Prevent Another Lockdown
https://media.breitbart.com/media/2021/09/GettyImages-1235083275-640×480.png
“Come here, my little pretty”
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/09/19/tony-blair-says-govt-should-vaccinate-nursery-age-children
Doesn’t give up, does he?
Is he as demonic as he looks or is he just a committed globalist with aspirations to be back in power? Of course, the the two conditions may be inseparable.
If Blair is in favour of something you can be almost certain that it is the wrong thing to do, and that it will ultimately do a lot more harm than good.
A good rule of thumb is to do the opposite of anything that that evil bastard proposes. You won’t go far wrong.
Yep, if Lucas, Blair, Chakrabalti, Gummer, or [insert any officialdom wonk] want it, the exact opposite is the right course of action.
Morning all.
I would not be sorry if that monster met with an extremely nasty fatal accident. I’ve never felt that way about another (human) being before.
I used to feel the same way; nowadays my list is longer.
I used to feel the same way; nowadays my list is longer.
Government should impose a gagging order on Tony Blair. For this odious toad I’d support the Alexander Dumas / Louis XIV way of doing things.
“Put this man away where no one will hear his insanity. Let him be fed by a deaf-mute but feed him well.”
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/88a2742778d53e881496f579bfa449da890945718ad5821a21519d0894fb1776.jpg
Coming to a parish near you…
https://twitter.com/BreitbartLondon/status/651046812296585216?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E651046812296585216%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.breitbart.com%2Feurope%2F2021%2F09%2F19%2Fgay-swedish-priest-vows-he-will-not-marry-straight-couples%2F
Why has that tweet emerged now after six years?
This sort of thing is killing Christianity. This odious woman clearly has a death wish for the Church – is this why she became a minister?
I wonder what Richard coeur de lion would have said.
She’s clearly in the wrong religion.
Dear life. The world’s gone mad.
She’d last a long time in Kabul …. other Islamic shiticities are available.
https://img4.bdbphotos.com/images/500×250/g/s/gsbca0s9e27h29.jpg?skj2io4l
Delingpole: ‘Too Hot to Train’ Because Climate Change, Whines Army GeneralM
https://media.breitbart.com/media/2021/09/GettyImages-78512296-e1632062763611-640×481.jpg
A British army general has warned that climate change could soon make it “too hot to train” at certain times of year.
Lieutenant General Richard Nugee, the Ministry of Defence’s Green Tsar, said in a speech to Defence and Security Equipment International:
On land, a warm year in the 2000s will broadly become an average year in the 2040s, affecting our ability to train, as we lose more days to being ‘too hot to train’. A recent study by the UK Met Office identified that in temperate climates the number of days lost to training due to increases in temperatures is likely to rise by between 75 and 150 per cent by 2040. In Cyprus, the projection is that all training will be lost in August to heat.
But it’s not all bad news, Nugee went on to argue. First, going green might make the Army more attractive to recruits who are into that sort of thing:
*
*
*
Where have I heard that name Nugee before?
Gosh – lucky he wasn’t involved in the Desert War….
He wouldn’t have lasted 5 minutes after Montgomery took over. The latter wouldn’t tolerate belly achers, no matter their rank.
We need another such.
Is he related to Lady Nugee?
Brother-in-law (long suffering)
I did wonder.
The new recruits will be well accustomed to the heat…..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3NfOGvhpxc
“Where have I heard that name, Nugee, before?”
Common Purpose classes maybe?
Ha! Ha ha! These are the same people who put a tank’s emissions targets above it’s firepower?
Anything to do with Lady Nugee? The Labour blobster who sneers at the native English? Her husband is a judge; maybe it’s his brother.
Sorry, we are fully booked over the autumn half-term:
https://twitter.com/ActivePatriotUK/status/1439137345085886466?s=20
I wonder how quickly the new “guests” will turn it into a shit-hole….
And our idiots in charge then wonder why the
gimmegrantsasylum seekers are totally dissatisfied with what they are offered as permanent accommodation.They seem to be getting better facilities than the travellers arriving back from red list countries and paying thousands for the privilege of being imprisoned.
Why have they got to Lancashire? Why are they not in a shipping container waiting to be posted away?
There was a small but loud protest in Oxford Street yesterday afternoon by a hundred or so people demanding that there be no cap on the number of Afghans allowed into the UK. Some of their banners simply said, “We do not recognise the Taliban as our government”. Well, fair enough but why should that mean moving the entire population of Afghanistan here?
One Size Fits All
Two nuns were behind the convent smoking cigarettes, when one said, “It’s bad enough that we have to sneak out here to smoke, but it really is a problem getting rid of the cigarette butts so that Mother Superior doesn’t find them.”I’m not certain, perhaps you could recommend a good size for a Camel? “
The second nun said, “I’ve found a marvellous invention called the condom, which works really well for this problem. You just open the packet up, take out the condom, and put the cigarette butt in, roll it up, and dispose of it later!”
The first nun was quite impressed and asked where she could find them.
“You get them at the drug store, sister, just go and ask the pharmacist for them.”
The next day the good sister went to the drug store and walked up to the counter. “Good morning, Sister,” said the pharmacist. “What can I do for you today?”
“I’d like some condoms please,” said the nun.
The pharmacist was a little taken aback, but recovered soon enough and asked, “How many boxes would you like – there are twelve to a box.”
“I’ll take six boxes,” said the nun. “That should last about a week!”
The pharmacist was truly flabbergasted by this time, and was almost afraid to ask any more questions, but his professionalism prevailed. “Sister, what size condoms would you like? We have large, extra large, and big liar size.”
The sister thought for a minute, and finally said, “
Ooh! Acknowledging the Yanks, Tom, with their jokes.
It doesn’t take too long to translate them into English, e.g. chemist for “drug store” etc., for an English audience.
“a English audience?”
An English audience, surely.
Tie-poe.
Muphry’s law.
As we’re dealing with the printed word, I should have thought it was an English readership rather than an audience..
Probably.
From the internet (where else?):
Through the Internet, every person is given the opportunity to participate in different ways. The Internet gives people a platform to write and reach the people who are interested in what they are writing about. When writers write online, they are able to form communities with the people they share common interests with. The audiences that people are trying to reach can be general or specific, all depending on what the writer is discussing in their online posts. Audiences have to go and check into what the writers are writing to stay on top of the latest information. Writers have to find their niche and try hard to work their way into an already formed community. The audience the writer is reaching is able to respond to the writers posts and can give feedback. The Internet allows these connections to be formed and fostered. In the Here Comes Everybody book by Clay Shirky, there are various examples of how audience is not only receiving content but actually creating it. Internet creates a chance of being part of an audience and a creator at the same time.
Pharmacy is more precise…
I’ll get me white coat!
Apoteket?
Nettopp, Grizz!
Bra, Paul.
A good Shaggy Dog story . . .
Thank you, Stupendus. It also highlights the stupidity of Americans.
SIR – As a former member of the BMA’s GP committee, I am ashamed that its current chair denies the suggestion that patients are receiving worse care due to the rise of telephone and video consultations.
The evidence – from the many letters you and others have published, and from coroners’ reports – is definitely to the contrary. I know of one person who has been unable to see his GP about a knee problem, and has had to go private; another needs a blood test, which has been cancelled; and when I telephoned my GP practice, I had the call cut off after holding on for 40 minutes.
The reports of a young girl who died of appendicitis after three telephone consultations are but the tip of the iceberg. GPs must resume face-to-face consultations. I do, however, agree that more needs to be done to increase the number of GPs available.
Dr Malcolm Freeth
From Todays’ DT Letters: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/09/19/gps-have-no-right-demand-extra-funds-resuming-normal-service/
BTL
Dr Martin Freeth says that we need more doctors. He is right.
Perhaps the crassest decision of the moronic George Osborne was to change the pension arrangements for doctors so they discovered that they would be worse off if they continued working. This led to a very large number of doctors – including my nephew – taking early retirement at a time when Britain was already becoming short of doctors.
I wonder if there would be a shortage of MPs if Johnson changed the outrageously generous pensions that they receive. Hey, that’s an idea – we have far too many of them and a cull is necessary.
Everything Osborne did was wrong. Virtually every idea was bad. He didn’t have a clue what he was doing. If the damage he did wasn’t so serious it really would be comedy gold.
He is the worst chancellor since Churchill at least, so for ninety years. Perhaps even worse than Churchill who took poor advice, whereas Osborne thought he was an economic genius for some reason when he’d never even studied the subject. He arrogantly dismissed economists telling him he was being retarded, sacked anyone that disagreed with him.
Tory ideology economically is dangerous, stupidly so. We’ve been in austerity for 10 years and it’s earned us nothing but a lost decade. The benefits system has been savaged it’s so bad now it’s virtually worthless. This has caused crime to take off massively. House price to wage ratios are worse than ever. Highest tax burden ever. NHS damaged by lack of funding and putting Hunt the Runt in charge of it for so long.
This so-called ‘economic consensus’ meaning all main parties offer the same crap is slowly strangling the people of this country to death. Sure a few are successful and get rich, but multitudes more face a life of wage slavery, and needing an inheritance to own a house to bring a family up in across large parts of the country, not even able to afford anything for recreational activities, literally existing rather than living.
We’re in terminal decline. It’s never getting turned around now. The NHS problems are just one of many symptoms of this now quite major problem.
It’s being so cheerful wot keeps me goin’…
‘Morning, Russell.
Night John lol.
I worked last night, I’m working tonight, I’m dying to sleep but the blocks smoke detector has been spazzing out all morning and it’s a real screamer.
You start well, then screw up when you claim we’ve had “Austerity” for 10 years.
No we have not. All Osbourne’s tinkering at the edges achieved was to slow down the rate at which the Deficit increased and as long as we spend more than we, as a country, earn, we will be heading towards disaster driven by the bullshite fallacies of Fiat Money.
This article won the Emmy Award for best comedy article 2020 but has been widely under reported:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/911817/electricity-generation-cost-report-2020.pdf
Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy. You have to read all of it to appreciate the wit, wisdom and worth of this historic piece.
It should also be submitted as a contender for the Booker prize for fiction. That UK is not self sufficient in energy, with secure supply, is a demonstration of dereliction of duty of 50 plus years of government, of all parties.
I find this whole ‘not enough gas/prices too high’ laughable. The government wanted this. It has deliberately engineered a situation where gas was scarce. Now it is, we’re being told we’ll have to pay more for it.
This is what government wanted. Blaming the energy companies is stupid. The state slapped a cap on prices because it was scared of the backlash – or, more likely it wanted this situation to occur. Blaming the energy companies and bailing them out is precisely the very obvious, avoidable and inevitable situation the government wanted.
If it didn’t, it would have found an alternative gas supplier. More supply, same demand means lower prices.
It’s as if big fat state is laughing at us as people blame the energy companies for high prices when government is the one engineering them.
They wanted “green” so now this is the price we’ll all have to pay.
We are to die for it.
But no one really wanted ‘green’ at all. The state just uses it as a cash cow.
Life’s too short to get stuck into that.
It would be the epitome of amphigory if it wasn’t meant to be serious. Stenographic diarrhea.
I liked the page of acronyms best.
There was one missing though – FOAD.
And FUBAR
Spent the morning talking to an accountant. We’re running fibre throughout his building as part of an uprating exercise for their LAN. The intent is to get gigabit to the desktop, ten gig between their core services and to switch fabric with 100gig interconnects between core switches and some access points dotted about the place (that’s a short hand for ‘long winded and expensive installation of coverage mapping’.
El bean counter is doing his job and trying to screw down the costs. However, the best one so far has been to remove the switch interconnects. He’s not so dim but is looking at different transceiver types and fibre cables. I am just waiting for the ‘my nephew who’s into computers says…’.
We itemise everything deliberately so folk know what hard ware they’re buying, and the unit price, but balking at our day rates is getting annoying. We’re good at what we do. We’ll maintain and provide support for 3 years after install, on site – and as this thing is in London it’s a nasty journey that I’ll hate.
“I’ve just googled what you say and that tells me….”
Don’t!
Already done the ‘there’s a 24 port one here for half the price, we only want 10 ports, let’s buy that….’
Backplane capacity! Redundant power supplies! Faster processor! Gah. The worst one we had was a chap asking why we couldn’t use cat5 for a run as fibre was too expensive. There we *did* have ‘my son who’s into computers’ along and this spotty 16 year old was embarrassed and interested. Overall, it was a good day. Got the chap making up cables for the really short runs and using the Fluke at the other end.
On the upside, the accountant is listening, he’s just doing a good job of getting the best he can – it is a bit of a ‘mate of a mate’ Rolls Royce approach contract.
“Just checked on Amazon….”
Onward to the tera!
“If you think the professionals are expensive, wait until you hire an amateur…”
https://twitter.com/LSW12612672511/status/1439879435960868864
Just part and parcel of living in a city. S. Khan.
Which is why Khan obviously needs bullet proof vehicles and security to go anywhere.
The maize is now being harvested .
I love the sweet scent of the ground up maize crops , really beautiful smell as the trailers and lorries pass by laden with green chewed up maize ..
“The kit and teams are ready to make a start on the 2021 Maize Harvest.
This is a key high quality forage for us which aids milk production and cow health.
It is critical to harvest this crop at the perfect time to ensure we capture as much starch/energy as possible.
This is a really busy time of year for Farmers especially those supplying Maize to the Green Energy, Dairy and Beef sectors.
Sorry in advance for any inconvenience over the next month.
Please be patient on the roads and behind our trailers. We will all be trying to finish this years harvest as efficiently and safely as possible.
Good luck to all our team and many friends in the industry for a good run.”
No problem using it for fodder – but it should not be used as biofuel!
There are hundreds of acres of maize waiting to be be harvested , I agree, it should not be used as bio fuel, and what a waste of land , but I think that is the crop that may get the most return , because it is a trendy crop .. Ethanol v grain crops !
What I’m interested in is how much goes towards food for cattle and humans, and how much and which bits get burned as ‘bio-fuel’.
My dad refused to eat it. He said, “That’s what we feed to the fowls.”
No problem using it for fodder – but it should not be used as biofuel!
Good to hear you calling it by its proper name, Maggie. In the UK “corn” is the traditional name for wheat.
Morning all.
GPs have no right to demand extra funds for resuming normal service.
Perhaps it might be better establish just how much proactive and practical work GPs have carried out in the last 18 months and then and only then can they put their fake claims in.
Do they ever have Performance Reviews, with pay rises related to how well they have done over the past year?
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/gp-funding-and-contracts-explained
I’ve never heard of anything like that, I think any one paid by the public purse, i every respect should have to stand up and be counted. Including the counters.
Let’s get one thing clear: the only “phobia” that I know I possess is claustrophobia, a fear of confined spaces, and I know that I am not alone in that.
The suffix -phobia means a fear of something. A fear is not what I have of transvestites — they do not scare me; it is a loathing. With that in mind, any weirdo wishing to label me a “transphobe” will get a sharp rebuke and will be educated to the fact that I am simply transaverse, since it is an aversion to them that I hold, not a fear.
This is similar to the way that I am “islamaverse”, “Leftaverse”, “shocking-pinkaverse” and “veganaverse” (among, probably, a few other aversions).
Very good point Grizz.
Good morning all.
Cloudy.
Good morning Mr Viking.
Its gloomy and dull .
‘allo Ethel.
It may be dull, but surely never gloomy.
The country should have voted for change, not what we have now. Vote reform party its the only way.
Folic acid to be added to all white bread flour. Do malformations of babies occur in some communities more than others?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58615838
Yes!
“Society as a whole” is a bit of a giveaway. As usual, it means the opposite.
Well it does at the moment. In 20 years time…
Could it be a result of too much inter-breeding?
Thankfully, I don’t eat white bread. In fact, I don’t eat much bread at all.
Man arrested after four found dead in house near Sheffield. 20 September 2021.
“Terrible and hugely tragic news from Killamarsh this evening. Our condolences to the family and our thoughts are with them,” Rowley tweeted.
The Conservative MP also paid tribute to Killamarsh as a “lovely community” that would show its resilience.
“Killamarsh is such a lovely, close-knit and warm community, and I know that many residents will be shocked and worried by the news,” he tweeted. “This is believed to be an isolated incident with an arrest having been made. I’ve no doubt that the village will pull together at this difficult time.”
Judging by the wall of silence and the delicate, not to say saccharine coverage, a reasonable guess might be taken as to the ethnicity of those affected!
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/sep/20/man-arrested-after-four-found-dead-in-house-near-sheffield
In the event, KILLAmarsh is rather unfortunate….
Ah, Snap!
‘Morning Bill.
Mine was first! Good day, Tom. Though it isn’t. It is a shite wet morning.
Lovely sunny day here!
Sunny here too now.
Watery sun just this minute appeared. At last. It was supposed to do so at 9 am
Sounds as if Killamarsh is an apt name for the area.
I worked at Killamarsh for a while in the 1980s. It is in North East Derbyshire, not Sheffield.
Close to Sheffield though.
It would have been closer still if the boundaries commission had had their way in 1974. Nearby Kiveton Park had already been grabbed by South Yorkshire from Derbyshire and Beighton, Halfway, Killamarsh
and Barlborough were earmarked to do the same. That is, until my feisty cousin, a dyed-in-the-wool 5′-0″ Labour supporter and firecracker, got her friend, Dennis Skinner, to back her in taking a petition of more than 20,000 votes to Parliament, where she got on her soapbox and told them that Barlborough would leave Derbyshire “over her dead body”. She won, and Barlborough and Killamarsh remain in Derbyshire.
Man arrested after four found dead in house near Sheffield. 20 September 2021.
“Terrible and hugely tragic news from Killamarsh this evening. Our condolences to the family and our thoughts are with them,” Rowley tweeted.
The Conservative MP also paid tribute to Killamarsh as a “lovely community” that would show its resilience.
“Killamarsh is such a lovely, close-knit and warm community, and I know that many residents will be shocked and worried by the news,” he tweeted. “This is believed to be an isolated incident with an arrest having been made. I’ve no doubt that the village will pull together at this difficult time.”
Judging by the wall of silence and the delicate, not to say saccharine coverage, a reasonable guess might be taken as to the ethnicity of those affected!
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/sep/20/man-arrested-after-four-found-dead-in-house-near-sheffield
Furious France calls off EU trade talks with Australia over bitter Aukus submarine row
‘Keeping one’s word is the condition of trust between democracies and between allies,’ said French Europe minister
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/09/20/furious-france-calls-eu-trade-talks-australia-bitter-aukus-submarine/
A couple of BTL Comments:
By Macron’s argument how can Britain continue to have anything to do with the EU and France after the way they have deliberately defied the purpose and spirit of the NI Protocol?
and one from a chap called Guiscardus Fox:
France is running out of feet to put in its mouth….
I know France and Germany tend to try to go their own way, but how can France call off the EU trade talks? That should be an EU decision in Brussels.
HA! HA! HA!
breathe…
HA! HA! HA!
British ‘baby shortage’ could lead to economic decline, says thinktank
Social Market Foundation suggests measures including better childcare provision to increase birthrate
Britain is facing a “baby shortage” that could lead to “long-term economic stagnation”, a thinktank has said.
The Social Market Foundation (SMF) said the birthrate was almost half what it was at its postwar peak in the 1960s, and the country’s ageing population could lead to economic decline.
It said ministers should set up a cross-government taskforce to consider the issue, and one helpful measure might be better childcare provision. The thinktank said typical British working parents spend 22% of their income on full-time childcare, more than double the average for western economies.
The birthrate in England and Wales peaked in 1964 when the number of children per woman averaged 2.93. Last year it was 1.58, well below the 2.1 replacement level needed to keep the population rate stable, and in Scotland it was even lower at 1.29.
In a report, Baby Bust and Baby Boom: Examining the Liberal Case for Pronatalism, the SMF said this would ultimately lead to a shortage of working-age adults.
“Pronatalism” is the policy or practice of encouraging the bearing of children, especially through government support of a higher birthrate.
“At present, there are a little under three over-65s for every 10 workers, but by the middle of the next decade that ratio will rise to 3.5, and by the 2060s the number will be closing in on four,” the report said.
“According to these projections, by 2050 a quarter of Britons will be over 65, up from a fifth today.
“This combination of a lower share of the population in work and a higher share in need of economic support clearly has a negative effect on the productive capacity of the economy.”
Cropped Hand Of Newborn Baby With Name Tag
New Zealand birthrate sinks to its lowest ever
Read more
The report says 28% of countries worldwide specifically adopt pronatalist policies to drive up the birthrate. In some countries these can take the form of direct payments to parents, such as in France, where there is a “birth grant” worth €950 (£810).
The report recommends the creation of a cross-departmental taskforce to ensure that when policies are being set, ministers take into account what impact they might have on population growth.
Dr Aveek Bhattacharya, the chief economist at the SMF and one of the report’s authors, said: “The question of whether the government should intervene to try to increase the birthrate is clearly a sensitive topic that must be delicately handled.
“However, given the alarming fall in fertility rates, and the risks that population ageing poses to our social and economic wellbeing, it is a discussion we should not duck.”
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2021/sep/20/british-baby-shortage-could-lead-to-economic-decline-says-thinktank
https://www.smf.co.uk/publications/baby-bust-and-baby-boom/
https://www.smf.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Baby-bust-and-baby-boom-Sep-2021.pdf
Now then, do YOU ALL see where this is going ?
Why would one want to bring a child into this dystopian world?
I was about to say the same. Sadly I think the better days are in the past and I do feel very sorry for babies born now, who knows what the world will be like when they are adults.
We have seen the best of our time: machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our graves.
[King Lear]
Things ain’t what they used to be!
When was the last time they were?
Like being born into Tsarist Russia c. 1910.
So that there are millions more slammers – very soon.
Just as we can get the wrong sort of snow in Britain in winter we also seem to have got the wrong sort of babies.
Well, I think differently.
At the height of the Industrial Revolution the population of the UK was 28m. That population sustained the greatest phase of uplift in manufacturing in human history.
Moving on to 1940 the population had increased to around 45m mostly a result of better living conditions, better nutrition, better access to medicine and understanding of health issues. (The production of babies was still “geared” to the high mortality rates of 200 years previously, as well as “making up” for WW1 losses.)
Prior to WW2 every city and town had factories, crammed with people churning out goods. The population was around 45m. As we moved into WW2 the numbers were sufficient to sustain everyday life and turn out vast quantities of war materiel and provide for around 3m servicemen.
Millions of manufacturing jobs have disappeared since then without being replaced.
So why would the UK need to have a population in excess of 50 million? The answer is that we do not.
Here is a key quote from Wikipedia:
“The population of the United Kingdom has undergone demographic transition—that is, the transition from a (typically) pre-industrial population, with high birth and mortality rates and slow population growth, through a stage of falling mortality and faster rates of population growth, to a stage of low birth and mortality rates with, again, lower rates of growth. This growth through ‘natural change’ has been accompanied in the past two decades by growth through net migration into the United Kingdom, which since 1999 has exceeded natural change.”. My highlighting.
Clear enough, we don’t need more people. They are being foisted on us.
https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Schooldays-in-the-1950s-1960s/
http://www.buttercupprimary.co.uk/
The first takes no account of the winter of 1947, here is milk delivery:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0e4b911d16024dd25bd28b182cdd07c098caa663cb2f56722c67310954da4b00.jpg
As for school milk, I loved it and had at least a couple more from those who didn’t like it.
Back then families had more children because the mortality rate was high. As diseases were reduce in the younger population and people became more comfortable and more wealthy they could not afford as may children because home ownership and higher taxes rates were introduced. to earners.
I agree re the population increases our idiots in westminster rant on about climate change. Increasing the population and using natural recourses to build homes and wiping out green belt etc increases our carbon emissions many fold but they must be lying as many of them do for a living because what they are allowing is counter productive to reducing carbon emissions. Long term environmental damage is inevitable. One has to ask what the hell are theses people who call them selves government actually playing at ?
Yes, exactly. I think that the big families as a response to high mortality was essential. When more children survived, they were not needed to look after the elder generation in their old age (no Welfare State). However, when big families have been “running in the family” for many generations, and everyone has big families it becomes traditional. That tradition may well continue for a number of generations after it has ceased to be a required survival trait.
Aren’t there enough people already?
Too many – of the wrong sort.
My word who thinks these things up. As far as I can make out the indigenous population of the UK have been put off from having families of more then two children because of the cost. It doesn’t take much to work out with a mortgage and other standard taxes to pay on top of house keeping and general expenses there is never enough money left to support children. Unless of course they as many do get everything for nothing as so many breeding ‘pairs’ do these days.
I though I had heard that Falling fertility rates were part of the jab processes. Surely they can’t have it both ways, I thought perhaps the un-jabbed have been selected to increase the population of do nothings and pay nothing. What is happening in the UK right now is akin to opening a corner shop and letting every one walk out with out paying for anything. The political class we have don’t seem to have a clue regarding the damage they are inflicting on the working population of the UK. Not a clue.
It is to explain the jab processes, when they happen in the not-too-far distant future. This is so sinister, evil.
The upsets to menstrual cycles should give women cause for concern.
The upsets to menstrual cycles should give women cause for concern.
The upsets to menstrual cycles should give women cause for concern.
Would this encourage matters?
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/78ca246ef66a63dea10c53a766a92561ca93f139e005129c6e2f5d0a3d3ff989.jpg
The Nazis also gave out medals to over-productive mothers.
History repeats itself and no-one takes notice.
At the moment I’m reading “God’s Englishman” which is about Oliver Cromwell.
The same characters pop up: Levellers = Momentum, the Scots pursuing their usual hobby of p!ssing off the English, the usual cast of ignoble characters turning in the wind like weatherc0cks, bloody minded nitpickers obsessed with legalism rather than reality…. all the usual suspects.
I was surprised to learn that Old Noll spent several months trying to get the King to settle for a constitutional monarchy because he felt this was what the English preferred. He is much more nuanced character than our image of him.
What they don’t say is how many people there are of working age who are not “workers”. I guess they probably don’t even know, as many of them will be illegal anyway.
Ask the Benefits Office. They will know.
Not all claim benefits.
My husband is very busy with being well organised for the holiday on Friday in Dittisham .
I’ve been given the full itinerary of what we are going to do which includes food to be eaten, clothes, weather etc.
I’m trying to encourage him to ge more spontaneous but it’ll never work, he is very well organised which good in a way but….
I have sailed up from Dartmouth to Dittisham on several occasions and my godson, Jeremy, had his wedding reception party in the grounds of the house once owned by Agatha Christie.
It was a splendid occasion – after a church service in a village near Totnes we boarded a boat on which Jeremy’s mother, a brilliant violinist, had assembled a string quartet to accompany us as we chugged down the river from Totnes to Dittisham.
All of us who played musical instruments were roped in to play as the party made its way along the route. Here I am playing the guitar with Christo on the mouth organ!
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0cda746fcf9ff3ec65848ca57c61e8f579ea5947efbd7f28e57c34d246f93411.jpg
That looks like a Yamaha APX…….. RT
It is actually Jeremy’s guitar and I can’t remember what is was. I have a Yamaha LL36 which is excellent.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ffdea620af8ceb8b93c1720519edd8f9e933822654666aa6893543c5c20c6812.jpg
How wonderful, sounds like a superb time was had .
We do hope to get to Agatha Christie’s House and Gardens again
and hope they will be open .
Can’t you take a calendar from last year with you? That might upset his plans.
Oh, he has the itinerary from last time too, is comparing them both, hmm .
Can’t you get his Mercian subjects to revolt? That should keep him occupied.
My husband is very busy with being well organised for the holiday on Friday in Dittisham .
I’ve been given the full itinerary of what we are going to do which includes food to be eaten, clothes, weather etc.
I’m trying to encourage him to ge more spontaneous but it’ll never work, he is very well organised which good in a way but….
Looks like Vlad is going to scrape home with a 97% majority. Amazing!
Pro-Putin party sweeps to election victory but challenges remain for the Kremlin. 20 September 2021.
Russia’s ruling party, United Russia, appears to have retained its majority in State Duma elections at the weekend, cementing its control of parliament and bolstering President Vladimir Putin’s power base
The party, which endorses Putin, has received around 49.7% of the votes so far, according to the latest results from Russia’s Central Election Commission.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/20/pro-putin-party-retains-majority-in-russian-vote-but-support-declines.html
How does he do it ???? 😄🤔
It just comes with being the most popular and able leader on the planet!The Russians know that they are fortunate to be led by such a man!
I have often said we would be better off if Vlad was in charge. 🤗
Amen to that!
339065+ up ticks,
Afternoon AS,
I believe he puts a great deal down to
reading the Inglorious Revolution & The road to freedom by Gerard Batten.
One thing is for sure Ogga he’d certainly get rid of the Dopey Wokies and the Greeny weenies and most of the self centred self opinionated garbage that professes to be running the affairs of our nation.
339065+ up ticks,
Afternoon RE,
The “real” obstacle is not so much the politico’s as the majority found in the electorate, the politico’s use the power given them again,again,again & again by the majority in the electorate.
The bulk of the electorate in turn are mainlining on party addiction ” you gotta vote for one to keep tother out” no matter of odious consequences and the country
being taken over piecemeal with the pieces getting bigger.
In reality regarding slavery the only ones I can see are those English that are continuing to put in 5/6/7/ shifts
to prop up the infrastructure as best they can.
Only hindrance from the politico’s & secret malicious smiles from the lab/lib/con/green supporter / voters.
Of course, Vlad rigged the polls to make it look as though his party was trailing behind at 20%. Then my friend Mr Rashidski got on the case and – voilà.
Very neat
Vlad’s yer uncle..
https://c.tenor.com/8R_dggs3RIgAAAAM/whats-app-russian.gif
I keep watching, waiting for him to get tired and fall over – ah well, there’s probably a useless cricket match to watch, or even some wood, warping.
Someone please tell him his bicycle has been stolen.
Blazing Saddle?
Would that he were here.
Anyone might think skulduggery was afoot ! .
Well I thought I was ahead of the game here……over three days I have just spent several hours fixing a slow dripping annoying leak in our bathroom towel rail, with back up electric heater. All rads locked off, drained down pipework drain off cock also leaked but fixed in the process, of course fixed the leak etc fill up the system and fire up and test. All Okay. Phew !
But…………. will there be any gas to run our new boiler i wonder ? What has our stupid useless government done or not done this time ?
Well, today was a first. I was refused access to the surgery for a PSA blood test without a mask. “it’s policy and he refused, which he is entitled to do” said the dragon lady over the intercom to the assembled patients waiting to get in.
I’m off now. Don’t hold your breath.
Haven’t you got an exemption card?
I’ve got one, Ndovu, for tricky moments but I feel bad about it because I feel I have accepted their game by classing myself as exempt. Most of the time it has been hidden in my bag. It is the difference between ‘declining’ the vaccination and ‘refusing’ the vaccination.
I complied with the masking malarky for too long – then one day I decided I’d had enough of it – specs steaming up, not being able to hear what people were mumbling, and it made me realise just how much I rely on lip reading.
I have worn one since then on hospital visits only. I’ve read enough to know that they are pointless, don’t do anything to stop viruses and are dehumanising. My friends are still wearing them on the bus and in shops. I think people have become conditioned to them. Some are still very fearful as well.
When i was was admitted to the ward after being triaged in A & E, not only had they recorded my medicines wrong but also my name. address and tele number. We were both wearing masks.
On top of all that they can be a cause of bacterial pneumonia, and form a foundation in the airways for cancer. It was when my glasses (reading glasses) steamed up, I fell over a stand in Sainsbury and I had a panic attack, I couldn’t breathe (I was scared to take off the mask because of the disapproval I might have) – that I decided enough was enough and government should not be in the business of impeding that most basic right to life, the right to breathe freely and unimpeded. I haven’t worn one since my Sainsbury visit August 2020.
I don’t even wear one in hospitals now. I stick the exemption badge on. I’ve had enough.
When you go back (with mask on) they’ll tell you they’ve run out of vials. Our surgery has.
My surgery hasn’t. I have to give a blood sample on Oct. 1st for my meds review. I tried to give it a swerve over the shortage of equipment, but nothing doing, so I insisted on seeing the Swedish nurse, who does it absoluto painlessly, while we have a natter in her language.
Who might this be forcing her way to the front?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2021/09/19/TELEMMGLPICT000271784619_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqwR9CmnucIcqQaI247kVHKfVSc7sVuZw6puPpK1VdXwk.jpeg?imwidth=1260
The Settrington Cup at the Goodwood Revival Meeting.
A trans child.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2021/09/19/TELEMMGLPICT000271775001_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqrpfQw2hJyG_yckwxPAr0go9KzD8cVu9iguqnaKUswZA.jpeg?imwidth=1260
Fagradalsfjall, Iceland which started erupting in March for the first time in 800 years
Even more CO².
Enough to wipe any savings made anywhere in Europe.
Suck it up Boris and Nut nuts.
Typical Icelanders. None of them brought any spuds, chestnuts or bonfire toffee.
Spot on comment.
Now, what about the carbon dioxide shortage leading to food shortages? I’ve given up on coincidences since Johnson and his criminally negligent shower came to power. Anyone with a few functioning brain cells who continues to believe in the bumbling, “Good old Boris,” persona, please leave the Country immediately.
https://twitter.com/A_Liberty_Rebel/status/1439567397770473473
La Palma, Canaries, CO₂ anyone?
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/bb3b8dbfe8a4bbc947070803f3c0d47c60660ad62a92cafab1a750be58fae584.jpg
They didn’t ignore them. They actively engineered the situation.
https://www.takimag.com/article/only-permanent-interests/
Comment on AUKUS and the blind-siding of the French and for that matter the EU.
A few prayers needed here, it election day in Canada and the
expertstalking heads are predicting a liberal minority government.Apparently six years of corruption and outright lies have not been enough to persuade the woke mob that pretty boys nice hair is not a reason to elect the vain creature.
So it is probably goodbye to Canada as a country. If pretty boy continues to run the country down and continues his virtue signaling act of flying the flag at half staff indefinitely, watch the west leave.
Oh and in case anyone was contemplating a visit, vaccine passports become mandatory on Wednesday for anything but the most basic living.
Private Fraser was right, we’re doomed I tel. You, doomed!
A liberal minority govt may well be the best that they (the talking heads) can hope for, and trying to swing a few more votes. Trying to get the self-fulfilling prophecy horse out of the stable. And to explain the rigging!
Princess Beatrice has given birth to a girl.
Has the infant lots of teeth?
Probably not yet.
And its mouth always open – that’s what its mother does. Her nanny never told her to keep it shut in case she caught a fly….
She has what are known in the trade as an incompetent lip posture.
And Carrie? Is that why she always has too many teeth showing?
Yes.
http://i4.cmail20.com/ei/j/24/8FC/6BA/csimport/Screenshot2021-09-20at11.28.28.112839.png
‘Do you have confidence booster jabs?’
Oh, the irony.
“The protesters, who have been regularly flanked by the police in previous protests, were alone for the beginning of their action in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, because officers were caught in the traffic jams.”
Trudeau in blackface row (again). 20 September 2021.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/59e4172c8f4dd5485cd5b573231e2146d9b3b315966faced40b75cd496b4c4b6.png
Justin Trudeau’s snap election has just gone from bad to worse. The incumbent Canadian Prime Minister decided last month to call a snap election to improve his parliamentary standing.
Now just hours before the polls are due to open, a fresh photo has emerged of the hereditary premier grinning in blackface. Released by an anti-Trudeau campaign group, it shows the liberal icon at an Arabian Nights school event, clad in a turban and robes with his tongue protruding manically. Similar pictures from the same event infamously surfaced in 2019 but this is the first time this particular image has been released – and in glorious technicolour too.
This guy is an even bigger plonker than Boris!
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/trudeau-in-blackface-row-again-
https://twitter.com/truthbeforepc/status/1439933327633494023?s=20
As Gordon Brown sold most of the UK gold reserves the only option left is to trade in the wallpaper at the No 11 flat.
This fellow misunderstands entirely.
Look: the state wants high gas prices. High prices drive down demand.
Less demand means government meets it’s Left wing stupid target.
It makes the inefficient, expensive and polluting heat pumps look more attractive.
Government gets it’s way.
Folk forget: this is deliberate. It was obvious there was a restriction on supply. It was inevitable that gas prices would soar. The whole farce was planned, intentional and deliberate. All to meet utterly pointless, irrelevant targets about a trace gas we now find we need more of.
I despair. The lunatics are running the asylum.
Just been reading about the gas crisis in the DM. It says there are over 4000 comments. When you scroll down to the comments there aren’t any.
Go figure Phizz!
6000+ now and 38 pages+ visible
It is the same with other, er, inflammatory articles too.
BBC News at One
Simon Jack says Don’t Panic! to those of us who have been taking the meerkat’s advice and signed up for fixed term lowest cost energy deals wiith the smaller energy companies five of which are already unable to fulfill their contracts.
He suggests you take your meter reading, sit tight and wait for Boris to sort out how the Government price cap on energy won’t lead to a flood of applications for supply from the big players at uncommercial rates.
(In the meantime it’s advisable to binge watch the complete box set of Dad’s Army and only put the kettle on when you’ve received the enabling QR code from the Government)
We went back to Scottish Power this summer on a fixed rate which was lower than Bristol Energy were offering. BE started lower but put their prices up as soon as we’d signed up with them a couple of years ago.
Soon be back to coin in the slot Ndovu!
Change of subject .
Look at this and enjoy it .
Sent by my younger sister from SA
Here is the link to the uTube talk on Protecting Trees from Elephants with African Honeybees by Robin Cook.
I’m sure you will all enjoy it!
https://youtu.be/bG_AA6H_R2o
I found it eventually! It seemed to disappear when I was looking for it.
Interesting project. I did push it forward a bit as he was quite long-winded.
Just back from Battersea Power Station station. Most passengers on the Underground were wearing face nappies. I wasn’t challenged for not doing so, but perhaps the Millwall supporters cap helps on such occasions.
Am I alone in wondering whether the rise in gas prices is very good news for Boris Johnson in his plans to get everyone to throw away their gas boilers and install heat pumps. In fact, has he been in touch with Putin to get things fixed?
Absolutely not. If BoJo and pals lead us into a winter of three day weeks and frozen pensioners he’ll be out on his ear.
I think that’s a job already done what merit has he earned as PM what has he ever done for the good of this country during his tenure ?
It’s all done deliberately to make the green energy look cheap.
They’ll have to push up the price of gas much further to make air pumps look cheap.
Ours costs about twice as much to run as our old oil boiler.
I expect they are onto that.
It’s cheap until you actually try to use it and it is either a) runs out after a day, or b) isn’t there on day 1.
See my earlier post Rastus, I pray for a hard winter, it will be the end of this net zero carp and the end of Boris as well.
Not enough ‘leccy for heat pumps, car charging…
Well… err… yes? Why did you think they wanted to make gas so expensive?
Yippee!!
12:50pm email announcement that the appalling Stephen Toope, Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University, is buggering off back to Canada as of the end of September. It sounds to me very much as if he was pushed and not a moment too soon. Watch this space.
Did they have his scalp?
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
He wants to take Prejanaptra Gupta with him!
Apparently Princess Beatrice has given birth to a baby girl. Her husband, that Italian chap I think has a little boy already.
Fair dues to them. She seems a decent sort, happy to stay out of the limelight and continue working as a representative without demanding the pomp and ceremony of her role.
Don’t be fooled — there’s method behind Macron’s madness. 20 September. 2021,
The key to Macron’s strategy is to establish a European military alliance independent of Nato, an alliance which he has already declared ‘brain dead’. In this new order, France, the only militarily capable member of the EU, would be the undisputed leader.
France against Russia, (since it can be no none else) didn’t they try that once?
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/don-t-be-fooled-there-s-method-behind-macron-s-madness
“... France, the only militarily capable member of the EU, would be the undisputed leader.”
It has the most, and most effective, white flags
Hold back for a few weeks and history will repeat itself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbxgYlcNxE8
Just IMAGINE an army with 27 different languages, weapons, uniforms….aims…
They’ll have to use one language that everyone understands…
No, don’t tell; it’ll come to me in a moment.
Most of whom don’t work on weekends.
It’s a recipe for disaster. Like everything the EU does. Comically, people forget that the intent of an army is to defend the nation state. The EU is not a nation. It’s a communist dictatorship. Thus what this army will really be used for is enforcing EU policy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuIol63oAmI Bruce Dickinson, lead singer with Iron Maiden (also a qualified airline pilot and champion fencer) was pissed off when a German TV company ordered his band to mime to one of their records. Since they were contractually obliged to mime, they ensured that they would make it clear to the world that they were miming.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7112536400511bb5326f5b936fc9d4592bfa5dbfdcd3ded75607b4d6eda5f5fc.jpg
SCHOOL OPENS ON MONDAY 6TH SEPTEMBER 2021
Asalamualaikum warahmatulahi wabarakatuhu
Dear Parents
Alhamdulillaah – All praise and thanks be to Allaah! We pray that you have all enjoyed your summer break.
Due to changes in new legislation. We are required to conduct safeguarding training to meet the new standards for KCSIE 2021
Please note that the first day of the school will now be on Monday 6th September 2021.
We look forward to welcoming you on Monday 6th September 2021
Arrival time
Children must arrive at school by 8:25 allowing for a prompt 8:30 start.
Learning this Term.
A full curriculum delivery is planned that will span for around 7 weeks.
Term Dates
The term dates are Monday 6th September 2021 to Tuesday 21st December 2021.
Parents, carers, and guardians can take a look at the learning overviews for this term via this link: What are we learning?
Homework and Flip Learning
Classroom learning will be supported by the flip learning portal which will have learning tasks to be done at home before the lesson. Weekly homework will also be available here. Please click here to access the flip learning portal: Flip Learning and Homework
Lunches
School lunches will be provided as usual from Monday 13th September. Children who usually bring a packed lunch will need to bring in a healthy pack lunch every day. No fruit or sugar based yoghurts, cakes, biscuits, crisps sweets or chocolates. We encourage high fibre and protein foods such as vegetables / wholegrain foods such as brown rice, beans pulses and wholemeal based foods.
School Uniform
Please ensure that your child arrives in FULL school uniform The school blazer must be worn as well as appropriate shoes (no trainers)
PE Uniform: If your child has PE they can wear their full PE uniform to school including their trainers instead of their normal school uniform. PE lessons will start from this Monday and thus we advise for children to bring in their PE kit from this week.
You can buy the uniform from the shop below:
Ocean designs
10 Watney Market
E1 2PR
0207 702 8881
Dismissal times
Dismissal times will be staggered as follows:
EYFS- 15.35 pm
Primary: 15:45
Brief History:
Buttercup Primary School was the result of a strong intention, dedication and hard work from a young mother who carried a vision of creating a safe and secure learning environment, that will consist of highly qualified members of staff who will pursue the goal of bringing up the next generation of young children with a good balanced teaching of both the National Curriculum and the Islamic Curriculum with high standards.
IMG_0459
Today the school continues to strive to be a welcoming centre of learning in which Islamic education is flourishing. Muslim values, principles and standards lie at the heart of our education alongside a strong recognition of world faiths and the multicultural society in which we live in.
Vision and Aims:
Our vision is to develop a Muslim generation capable of analytical and critical thinking who become Muslims by conviction and who will strive to fulfil their role positively and proudly in multicultural Britain alongside others. Our excellent facilities and resources develop enjoyment and pleasure in learning and promote the personal development of our pupils both spiritually and socially to become well-rounded individuals who are able to make a valuable contribution to Society.
As well as the vision statement, the school lists a number of aims. These include for the children to:
Develop knowledge and skills through an exciting and creative curriculum which fosters a lasting enjoyment of learning.
Provide a distinctively Islamic environment within which children feel safe and happy and where faith, respect, honesty, trust and love are valued and actively promoted within everyday learning opportunities.
Show respect and empathy towards others, enabling them to make positive relationships with a wide range of people.
Celebrate success, promote a “can do” attitude and inspire each to achieve the best.
Allow pupils to develop confidence through a range of activities in a safe environment.
Tackling poverty and intolerance.
Care and respect for people and the environment in a context of social, moral, multi-cultural spiritual awareness, in developing in sensitivity to other peoples needs and point of view.
To recognise, support and celebrate achievements, of both the creative / technological skills and academic learning as equal outcomes as we recognise society as work force has roles for all.
The School is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and young people. In order to ensure this our recruitment and selection policy is in accordance with local and national guidelines.
IMG-20151005-WA0002 http://www.buttercupprimary.co.uk/
Walk around Brick Lane!
In our history lessons, we have been learning all about Britain since 1948. We took a trip down Brick Lane to look at the history there from the migration of the Bangladeshi community to the UK during the 1970s and learned about the contribution they made to the textiles and food industry. It was interesting to see how things have changed and developed since the 70’s! We enjoyed observing the atmosphere, signs, buildings and menus in the restaurants.
All very well in theory , but in practise, zilch . Why don’t these principles apply in Muslim countries , and why do they SUPPOSE they work here ?
Will they be singing ‘All things bright and beautiful?
…. The Muslim in his castle
Poor Whitey at his gate …..
Common Purpose and a woke ‘inclusive’ agenda.
From the start, with the praises to Allah, I thought it was a Madrassa curriculum.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/3b8e9c4173828b449b4a25c997922198497bd26168e9e6ca985362c771686b66.jpg Would that be the Common (or Harbour) Porpoise Phocoena phocoena, Tom?
Or are you talking about the El Salvadorian flat bread, pupusa?
Pupper?
typographical error.
It let me in, though. 🤣
You know full well what I was talking about, so let’s stop the points scoring and resume the battle against the Woke extremists, the current Police Farce and, most of all, the threat that the ideological Muslims present to us all – I don’t want to be part of the Western European Caliphate but I also want a Politilcal Party strong enough to present a Manifesto that reflects our English values.
How about you?
Agreed.
Humanity is no different from any other member species of the animal kingdom; we are intrinsically pugnacious and territorial. Throughout history we have fought off usurpers to defend our territory, mounted attacks on other territories to claim empires, and have used our innate aggression to do so.
Suddenly we have become tame, spineless, and permit a mass invasion of our territory without raising a whimper, never mind a sword. When are we going to regain our backbone, our pugnacity and our desire to defend territory?
If you forget your prayer mat,…………. head off in another direction.
Remember NOT to try to enrol your daughters. They should stay at home, out of sight until they are married to a cousin they haen’t ever seen
SCHOOL OPENS ON MONDAY 6TH SEPTEMBER 2021
Asalamualaikum warahmatulahi wabarakatuhu
Dear Parents
Alhamdulillaah – All praise and thanks be to Allaah! We pray that you have all enjoyed your summer break.
Due to changes in new legislation. We are required to conduct safeguarding training to meet the new standards for KCSIE 2021
Please note that the first day of the school will now be on Monday 6th September 2021.
We look forward to welcoming you on Monday 6th September 2021
Arrival time
Children must arrive at school by 8:25 allowing for a prompt 8:30 start.
Learning this Term.
A full curriculum delivery is planned that will span for around 7 weeks.
Term Dates
The term dates are Monday 6th September 2021 to Tuesday 21st December 2021.
Parents, carers, and guardians can take a look at the learning overviews for this term via this link: What are we learning?
Homework and Flip Learning
Classroom learning will be supported by the flip learning portal which will have learning tasks to be done at home before the lesson. Weekly homework will also be available here. Please click here to access the flip learning portal: Flip Learning and Homework
Lunches
School lunches will be provided as usual from Monday 13th September. Children who usually bring a packed lunch will need to bring in a healthy pack lunch every day. No fruit or sugar based yoghurts, cakes, biscuits, crisps sweets or chocolates. We encourage high fibre and protein foods such as vegetables / wholegrain foods such as brown rice, beans pulses and wholemeal based foods.
School Uniform
Please ensure that your child arrives in FULL school uniform The school blazer must be worn as well as appropriate shoes (no trainers)
PE Uniform: If your child has PE they can wear their full PE uniform to school including their trainers instead of their normal school uniform. PE lessons will start from this Monday and thus we advise for children to bring in their PE kit from this week.
You can buy the uniform from the shop below:
Ocean designs
10 Watney Market
E1 2PR
0207 702 8881
Dismissal times
Dismissal times will be staggered as follows:
EYFS- 15.35 pm
Primary: 15:45
Brief History:
Buttercup Primary School was the result of a strong intention, dedication and hard work from a young mother who carried a vision of creating a safe and secure learning environment, that will consist of highly qualified members of staff who will pursue the goal of bringing up the next generation of young children with a good balanced teaching of both the National Curriculum and the Islamic Curriculum with high standards.
IMG_0459
Today the school continues to strive to be a welcoming centre of learning in which Islamic education is flourishing. Muslim values, principles and standards lie at the heart of our education alongside a strong recognition of world faiths and the multicultural society in which we live in.
Vision and Aims:
Our vision is to develop a Muslim generation capable of analytical and critical thinking who become Muslims by conviction and who will strive to fulfil their role positively and proudly in multicultural Britain alongside others. Our excellent facilities and resources develop enjoyment and pleasure in learning and promote the personal development of our pupils both spiritually and socially to become well-rounded individuals who are able to make a valuable contribution to Society.
As well as the vision statement, the school lists a number of aims. These include for the children to:
Develop knowledge and skills through an exciting and creative curriculum which fosters a lasting enjoyment of learning.
Provide a distinctively Islamic environment within which children feel safe and happy and where faith, respect, honesty, trust and love are valued and actively promoted within everyday learning opportunities.
Show respect and empathy towards others, enabling them to make positive relationships with a wide range of people.
Celebrate success, promote a “can do” attitude and inspire each to achieve the best.
Allow pupils to develop confidence through a range of activities in a safe environment.
Tackling poverty and intolerance.
Care and respect for people and the environment in a context of social, moral, multi-cultural spiritual awareness, in developing in sensitivity to other peoples needs and point of view.
To recognise, support and celebrate achievements, of both the creative / technological skills and academic learning as equal outcomes as we recognise society as work force has roles for all.
The School is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and young people. In order to ensure this our recruitment and selection policy is in accordance with local and national guidelines.
IMG-20151005-WA0002 http://www.buttercupprimary.co.uk/
Walk around Brick Lane!
In our history lessons, we have been learning all about Britain since 1948. We took a trip down Brick Lane to look at the history there from the migration of the Bangladeshi community to the UK during the 1970s and learned about the contribution they made to the textiles and food industry. It was interesting to see how things have changed and developed since the 70’s! We enjoyed observing the atmosphere, signs, buildings and menus in the restaurants.
All very well in theory , but in practise, zilch . Why don’t these principles apply in Muslim countries , and why do they SUPPOSE they work here ?
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2051777172536a6fbb0ea11eb8b2f2b52c6cb53b88e1e740e1efd0a0c9684fac.jpg
Home Secretary faces mounting fury over M25 protests as eco-mob evade police for FOURTH time despite forces being read the riot act. 20 September 2021.
Asked if he thought Insulate Britain’s tactics of promoting climate change awareness by blocking motorways were effective or counter productive, the Prime Minister said: ‘I don’t think these people do any favours to their cause.
‘I think that what they do is detract from a very important moral mission that is widely shared by the people of this country.’
Quizzed if the police are doing enough to deal with the demonstrators, he added: ‘We are taking powers to be able to move protestors when they are threatening critical national infrastructure, when they are threatening to do serious economic damage and I think that is entirely right’.
It seems quite clear to me that this; like the Cross Channel Traffic is just another Government sponsored scam. The lack of reaction, the mealy mouthed opposition, the claim to a higher morality, all this is typical of the Globalist Agenda.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10008103/Eco-mob-block-M25-7am-TODAY.html
‘I think that what they do is detract from a very important moral mission that is widely shared by the people of this country.’
Liar !
Afternoon Phizz. We shouldn’t discount the possibility that this lot in Downing Street have all lost their marbles and are waging a Crusade to save the World!
Their ideology blinds them.
Good afternoon, Minty.
Since when has home insulation been a ‘moral’ issue?
Since when has Boris paid any attention to morality?
Between mistresses.
Is that a typo? Did you mean mattresses?
Shows the calibre of these pathetic, middle-aged, middle class, would-be rebel, home-owning protesters. They probably read the Daily Mail to find out what their house is worth, but only in secret, with a copy of the Guardian around it.
🙂 That is superb. On the train so everyone can see they’re ‘good’.
Riot Act? It was repealed in the UK in 1967. Still exists in some Australians States.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/19e8736e2b1f6524ec57b2cc8c19eb17eccf121fb19f55b96cc0b5eb8a995711.jpg
Another casualty of NHS music with phone on speaker.
I’ve shared that on Twatter. Am I really really callous for laughing?
If you didn’t laugh you would cry…
Very true. It’s got 6 likes and 3 retweets in just 5 mins on Twatter.
And then you were cancelled…{:¬))
FOAD !
FO And Die……..
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d02764a7cf9f9a391a4d4e4b7a032ef862c015302b6b392d8cca522a647ad02e.jpg
FK knows why we ditched the Commonwealth in favour of the corrupt EU..
Because we were led by lying, corrupt wankers who should have hanged for treason.
Sometimes it’s very sad to be right. I voted to leave in 1975 and never subsequently changed my opinion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVXN07dy6k8
Sadly, I was conned in 1975 and voted to stay in what I thought was a trading arrangement. As I became more interested in politics and found out what was going on, I campaigned to Leave as well as voting for it.
At the time, that was how the EU was sold. The truth was there, but far fewer people had access to the facts behind the lies. Now we’re thankful for the internet publishing them.
But the eurocrats don’t care. They desperately pass laws urgently trying to give them the power to control the internet but no sooner do they swiipe one website than 2 more pop up, usually outside their reach but back handers and fraud get them the power, usually by proxy.
The sad thing? A union of nations applying zero tariffs to good and services with vaguely common standards is not a bad thing. However, that was never, ever the intent of the EU. From the outset it was designed as a system to control the nations of Europe – a communist dictatorship.
Same here.”Just a trading bloc” so I voted remain. I was conned.
It was Heath.
Corruption, fraud, lies, deceit, bribes and malice.
The two-fingered Agincourt “salute” would be more fitting.
How many of you have experience of using public transport recently? I may have to take the train to Nottingham next month. Here’s the guff from the East Midland Trains website:
As far I can see it’s unenforceable but I just know I’ll attract the self-appointed vigilantes.
I took a bus trip into Bath last week, I was the only passenger not wearing a face nappy. I just sat there and smiled at all the sheep sat around me. Nobody said a word to me.
Interestingly on the return trip at least half the passengers were not wearing a face nappy. Nothing was said on that trip either.
I’m finding that at least 75-80% are still wearing face nappies on the tube but people are starting to sit next to me and not shy away so much.
I’d sit next to you any day, Our Susan.
Then she would move away pronto
Not when I show her my BBC pass…!
I daren’t ask what a BC pass is.
Bugger. Edited!!
(Carp kyebroad)
Being old and venerable I thought you might be referring to Anno Domini
Don’t bring up the Pushy Nurse again, for heaven’s sake…{:¬))
It means he was born BC. A sort of superior OAP’s bus pass.
Susan would immediately give up her seat. Sue has a heightened sense of smell.
If I may say so, that is rather rude. You may wish to think about deleting it. (A mob of heavies is standing by in Fareham,,,just saying).
Ooh cowers in fear….The truth is the truth !
Then I shall have you cancelled.
Fareham, Bob? You’re just up the road… give or take a city or two!
If you sat next to her, she’d pull the emergency cord.
I’ve only been on buses into town – not wearing a mask, although my friends do. Other passengers do, but not all of them. I won’t be hounded into it any more.
Tell them you are exempt. They don’t have the right to ask you to prove it (or explain how, come to that).
I’m aware of this and did plenty of shopping without one but on a one-hour train journey I’m likely to attract the nutter.
Human beings do have an immune system. Are these fools aware of the importance of exposure to poisons and toxins specifically to build up that immunity?
Can you solve it? Russia’s Prime Minister sets a geometry puzzle. 20 September 2021.
I chose this question today because it’s a lovely puzzle, and also because I found it curious that one of Russia’s most powerful politicians used a geometry question as a publicity stunt. It’s not every day you see a politician write out a maths problem on a blackboard and solve it, whatever country they might be from.
Mishustin, who is an engineer by training, told the sixth formers: “It seems to me that at your age it would be good to get some fundamentals. And when you have mathematical knowledge, physics, chemistry, you will be able to solve any problems, including business.”
The idea that a UK politician would advocate such subjects let alone be an engineer is beyond the remotest bounds of possibility. More likely Gender Studies and Colonial Oppression by the LGBTrans member for East Cheam!
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/sep/20/can-you-solve-it-russias-prime-minister-sets-a-geometry-puzzle
Possibly Russia’s next President.He’s in his early 60’s.
Before becoming Prime Minister he was Revenue Minister and reformed the tax system.
I cheated. I used my blank ruler to measure the distance from the red blob to the intersection on the circumference, then drew a line from the intersection the same length to touch the circumference (on the other side of the dimeter line). A line from the two points on the circumference cuts the diameter at right angles. Probably.
Are we witnessing the twilight of the woke?
With Government action and the arrival of new media outlets we are seeing how woke can be beaten
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/09/20/witnessing-twilight-woke/
A top BTL comment on the Telegraph article:
Mark Cooper
20 Sep 2021 7:44AM
I wouldn’t get too excited. A group of classical musicians have lost their jobs because they are white. Literally no other reason. Not a peep from the government.
The Marxist racist credo of Black Lives Matter is being forcibly introduced in dozens of state and state-funded organisations.
PC Plod is still harassing people who make factual claims, such as that there is only a biological basis for womanhood. Likewise Plod will arrest you for trying to clear a road of eco-nutters, but won’t lift a finger to shift the nutters.
We are nowhere near dealing with the civilisation-wrecking poison and one of the main reasons we are not is the total reluctance of the plastic Tories to confront those who peddle it.
And the 2nd BTL comment:
Carolyn Bates
20 Sep 2021 7:23AM
I so want to believe that we are witnessing the end of wokeness, but as we currently have the most woke Prime Minister ever to enter Downing Street, with socialist policies and virtue-signalling nonsense, then I am not going to hold my breath.
Nadine Dorries may well be the right person to take the BBC to task, but she must show us her intent, by outlawing the TV licence once and for all. Programming content should come after that.
What our Prime Minister needs to learn is that we did not vote for a woke PM, but that is what we got, as soon as he moved his then girlfriend in with him. This has not only continued, but increased, with his wife and woke father seeming to now be in control of all things environmental.
Who can forget the horror of Johnson’s speech at the end of the G7 summit, when he referred to his, ‘inner feminine’? I could not believe my ears until the camera went to the face of Mrs Johnson, who gave him an approving smile. It was then I knew for sure, that this PM was lost, never to return.
And the 2nd BTL comment:
Carolyn Bates
20 Sep 2021 7:23AM
I so want to believe that we are witnessing the end of wokeness, but as we currently have the most woke Prime Minister ever to enter Downing Street, with socialist policies and virtue-signalling nonsense, then I am not going to hold my breath.
Nadine Dorries may well be the right person to take the BBC to task, but she must show us her intent, by outlawing the TV licence once and for all. Programming content should come after that.
What our Prime Minister needs to learn is that we did not vote for a woke PM, but that is what we got, as soon as he moved his then girlfriend in with him. This has not only continued, but increased, with his wife and woke father seeming to now be in control of all things environmental.
Who can forget the horror of Johnson’s speech at the end of the G7 summit, when he referred to his, ‘inner feminine’? I could not believe my ears until the camera went to the face of Mrs Johnson, who gave him an approving smile. It was then I knew for sure, that this PM was lost, never to return.
Tim Stanley traded in his mild cannabis for skunk but now he’s jettisoned this for coke.
Does he seriously think the government has the testicular strength to sort out the problem of wokeness.
I cannot stand that man – he aided and abetted Treason in trying to cheat the country and stop it leaving the EUSSR. He now pretends to be holier than thou.
Blue Labour is not challenging the BLM nonsense because its function is to divert us from digital ids, and Blue Labour is totally on board with the digital id agenda.
Genius.
Bats with Covid like virus discovered in freezers.
I’ve got a good idea, let’s play mad scientists with them.
Cretins.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/bats-frozen-2010-coronavirus-covid-cambodia-b956254.html
Better still, cricket.
Very convenient.
Just in time for the November lockdowns.
Also backs up the Wuhan cover story.
Equally, the fact the silly arses are playing with the damned thing might confirm the lab escape story.
BTL Comment:-
I don’t have sufficient knowledge to confirm or deny, but given that bats don’t seem to be good news as far as viruses are concerned, I would be disinclined to caress them…
https://static.standard.co.uk/2021/09/20/13/ADAMS20210920.jpg?width=990&auto=webp&quality=75&crop=968%3A645%2Csmart
Well, well. As the sun came out at 1.30, I thought I’d give the bonfire a go. It took an age to get going: you know that sharp “crack” when you know for sure that the fire has taken and won’t let you down by going out? Never happened. I had to coax, stroke, nurture, feed. Eventually it did burn and now 2½ hours later, it is at the final “chuntering” stage – when it burns itself out.
So I am quite content (for a change). In my imagination, many wanqueurs posing as MPs were slowly burned to death…
A voice of reason.
P https://www.gbnews.uk/a/129481
HAPPY HOUR – Want to do your bit for the planet?
https://www.express.co.uk/sponsoredfeatures/news/uk/1478978/The-best-sustainable-and-environmentally-friendly-products-and-brands
So NoTTlers what precisely are you doing to save the planet?
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/37512fa7694fbf62a96285bcf01fb8032bca1f2e4818fb7ed3a563a62e42f7e0.jpg
Living normally. Ignoring the hype and the fiction spouted about it.
Burn climate scientists and greens to keep warm
Only breathe out half of the time.
Best just to breathe out, never breathe in.
Try ‘Box breathing’. it oxygenates the blood and stores it until expelled as untraceable gas. In your case you might need a chimney…
You breathe into a box? Have you ever SEEN a box? Perhaps you never played Creekit…
No. I don’t hang around changing rooms.
Box breathing is slowly breathe in for four seconds, hold for four seconds, breathe slowly out for four seconds.
It is not only good at calming yourself in an excitable situation it also allows you to get in the first punch !
Works well with carbon capture.
I re-use my Waitrose carrier bags as small bin liners. When full i put them in my re-cycle bin which then goes to landfill.
Not my effin’ problem !
I’ve been using the same bags for shopping for years and years………
Our vegetable waste from the kitchen goes in the compost bin. We waste very little food.
Our black bin (sorry,, bin of colour) for non-recyclable stuff goes out about once every six weeks. About a quarter full.
Ndovu
Did you watch my Ellie lnk I posted earlier ?
No – I’m just catching up after spending most of the afternoon in the garden. Will have a look.
My shopping is delivered and Waitrose charges for those bags and then do their own greenie thing. I’ve used them more than once. As i said…not my problem.
The only food i throw away is mouldy bread.
Give it to the birds.
It’s an old railway line. It will go to rats.
Poison it first.
My neighbour liked to feed the birdies. She had a big sack in her shed. The rat population exploded because the daft baggage hadn’t put it in a container. Other neighbours then put down rat poison.
Bye Bye Oscar. A fit and healthy Maine Coon with no injuries. Dead. That was my last cat.
That’s really sad. I am sorry that you lost him like that.
We get rats round here – and pre-G&P I had a poisoning spree. No longer.
That’s okay. And i can understand people putting down poison. Especially if they don’t have pets themselves where rats are running around.
G & P do kill young rats. They are wary of large, adult ones.
That’s really sad. A big beautiful cat like that.
The neighbour that attracted them wasn’t to know. And the neighbour the other side didn’t really know either.
I don’t blame them for their ignorance. We are all fallable. Always a shock to lose a pet but you can’t take out your grief on others.
That is very sad – you must be furious.
Our malevolent neighbours put poison in the barn on our property while we were away, because they thought there were martens there, and killed another neighbours’ cat.
We got our revenge, but not via an innocent cat.
Martens (as long as they don’t set up home in your roof) are a boon. The take out all sorts of creatures you really don’t want in your garden.
Do they eat slugs? (hopeful)
I would not be surprised if they did, but toads and hedgehogs are a better bet.
Try to encourages thrushes.
Slugs are nasty things, they carry diseases and parasites you wouldn’t want a pet to get.
They pass them on to hedgehogs too.
Very unpleasant creatures, slugs. The politicians of slime world. I’m sure they have a beneficial place in the eco system, but can’t think what it might be.
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/05/health/man-dies-after-eating-slug-on-dare/index.html
It’s about forty years since I saw a thrush.
I think I kill more slugs than any other predator in the garden does!
I have re-started the nightly slug hunt (I pour salt on them – chemical warfare!). I do have thrushes, but they don’t seem to be making sufficient inroads into the slug population. I won’t put down slug pellets for obvious reasons.
They have terrific fights to the death, which are very noisy, and I think that was what the neighbours objected to. Effing townies.
What, slugs?
Fury was part of the grieving process. I didn’t feel revenge would serve a purpose. I am still friends with those neighbours. Some closer than others. It did give me the opportunity to speak with them rationally.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7d10d0dd702c2c32de7182527cef1d7943aa2562864ee2053c56f77108e02efd.jpg
Beautiful cat.
20 year old photo doesn’t really do him justice.
Er… I guess a recent photo would do him less justice… 🙄
He would be a bit thinner now.
Glad to see your humour is aligning with mine… :@)
I’m older. Yours is aligning with mine. Apparently my Dad was well known for his dry sense of humour. Since I was not quite six when a car accident wiped him out, I doubt whether I ever noticed it. But I’ve certainly inherited it…
Next time we meet for lunch you have to sit next to me. We can sit and tell sad stories of the death of Kings.
And it’s your round next….
Absolutely.
Very sad.
People don’t think things through. Traps are a pain, I would kill far more mice with poison, but I stick with break-backs and marshmallow bait. The carcasses vanish within a few hours and don’t then kill up the food chain.
We’ve got rats round here and we also feed the birds. Our late cat, Sam was a good ratter but we’d never use poison.
As long as the population is stable no animal or insect is a problem. As you know.
I find the destruction of habitat and animals in Africa for money/sport unbelievable.
A family of elephants doing what they do supports myriad other species.
And the animal rights activists here whinge on about grouse shoots and deer hunts.
I really do give up.
Trophy hunting is an abomination.
Go on, admit it.
Boris Johnson’s head in your shed would make you happy and impress the neighbours.
Get Tony Blair’s head and you could charge admission.
Just ensure you have a big enough spittoon under it.
Would it fit in a shed?
The R 101 did.
Here’s a link to something far more interesting than the BJ.
No thanks!
Yo, Phil. Waitrose are phasing out 10p carrier bags. For the planet, obvs…
I have more supermarket bags than I can ever use, but today, I went shopping with a Hampton Estate hessian bag (with two wooden dowel handles). It dates from a time when 10kg of beef was rather less than £150…
It’s okay for you ! Your arms work !
Quite so, but what remains of the legs protests if I load them up. How are things?
Don’t want to spoil the mood…but…You can walk further than i can. Give us a leg up !
Oh dear. Sunday morning, Uber wouldn’t play ball, and the local taxi firm had nothing available. So I took a train and a bus, and walked, quickly, the last mile and a half, crossing the Hog’s Back. The word ‘moist’ springs to mind…
Sorry to hear that, Phizzee.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e97049705995450e9c6bd08cfb640dba76b0e3c4e0f13f7168b60d4d1d1bca66.jpg What a coincidence, Geoff. Only two days ago I took delivery, from Amazon, of two hessian shopping bags. You never see them here in Sweden and my old ones, with Morrison’s written on the side, are now well past their best.
I have several hessian bags, too. They have “Say NO to the EU” on them 🙂
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/862e349c86cbdf69539acad2bfee8f55e7e1f0fb84e6bff398b49039238dea65.jpg
Why are these greenies upsetting kids? What’s all this anxiety for? Why can’t they just shut up and let kids be kids?
Avaaz just helped launch the largest scientific study on climate anxiety in children and young people — showing that a majority feel *betrayed* by governments
failing to protect them. These governments are meeting for crunch talks
today — let’s make our call to listen to the youth the most discussed
topic on Twitter:
They never say who we are saving it for
Them.
The next generation? They seem to think it’s the oldies who have trashed it and caused all the problems but as we were saying last week, we didn’t have all this plastic when we were young.
I take the car whenever I can, and burn tyres in my back garden. I’m trying to counter the oncoming ice age.
Oh, and if I see someone walking past who looks like a greeniac, I switch all the lights on.
🤣
Reducing water consumption by drinking wine
If that’s the case, I should be knighted, minimum.
Helping to reduce the human population by every day getting closer to dying.
We’re all doing that, sadly.
Yup, that’s just my little bit.
Having been brought up on the mantras of “waste not, want not” and “make do and mend”, I pretty much never throw anything away if it has any use whatsoever. I have no children, grow my own fruit and veg (no air miles), holiday in this country and have planted plenty of trees.
Being human?
Evening all.
You will recall that I said the weather would get better when the schools went back. During the past two and a half weeks I only experienced rain on two half days whilst at the tiller. For those who want some fluvial pictures I’ll post a couple each day.
The boat in Bradford on Avon’s Dry Dock post blacking:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4f20e8881bad73ec4fd55276b2069e10e43b7594c60ce0605537a95371fdc209.jpg
Out on the cut – first evening at Seend Cleeve:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/34beb5a1d3f8b90c07849593e7fa653808a1104b2bdb74d7a77495079ec3ef7a.jpg
“Blacking”????? You completely mad?
It’s all the rage these days and only cost £14 per foot!
Racist as well as bargist.
Or Trudeauesque?
Very neat!
What did he black his bottom too?!
He didn’t stop at his bottom – those sort of people never do.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/96c4379bc1512e0cd46a078aa00c710517b1782db60d7444bfa699b4891af6b5.jpg
He’s a
SwamiSmarmy Devil….I think the look his wife (if it IS his wife) is giving him suggests that she would agree with you.
Trudy is prepared to suck any cock if it gets him votes…
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f4147f304687a2c8b6e303e93912cffda71f90fa6275e950ebc0e58e9a4b827e.jpg
Re the Pseudo Scottish one – Is he saying “Whoops someone’s stolen my caber?’ Thus proving he isn’t a complete tosser!
Cultural appropriation is ok if he does it?? He certainly enjoys dressing up.
I think he likes dressing up and pretending he is a human.
You could be on to something. Most of David Icke’s predictions have come to pass. Apart from the lizards. Er…
Icke and Robinson do share something in common.
The main one seems to be missing. C*NT!
Sorry, George, NO! They’re useful.
On this planet of massive overpopulation, Tom, it seems they’ve been TOO useful!
Trudeau, the prick that thinks it’s a cunt but in fact is an arse.
A Canadian TWAT, who has no idea where his loyalties lie – certainly not in Canada!
Only with second hand axel grease, allegedly.
https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/polopoly_fs/1.4603294!/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_620/image.jpg
https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/doug-ford-breaks-silence-on-justin-trudeau-s-brownface-scandal-1.4603276
The scandal has been around for years, Trudeau always resurfaces whiter than white.
https://twitter.com/BeardedBob7282/status/1440023071298138114
And so speaks a Morris man…
High tide, I see.
It was even higher in the lock ahead!
That’s amazing – water at two different levels. I suppose that gravity keeps it up…
Gravity eh? Amazing! I always put it down to other forces of attraction.
You are a magnet!
That’s me for this useful day. Bonfire almost burned out. Time for a reward in the form of a glass of medicine.
Have a jolly evening thinking about how to store electricity against the coming “worst winter on record”….
A demain
How much needs burned at your place, Bill. Do the neighbours empty their garden stuff into yours? You seem to have a bonfire more often than I can believe.
Bonfires of his vanity?
}:-o)
He has a lot of evidence to burn?
Bodies. Paper is terribly difficult to burn..
Two acres, Paul.
Lots of trees, shrubs and general garden waste. It mounts up daily. You should just see the MR at work with her secateurs and loppers.
I don’t quite have that much, but my garden produces a terrific amount of prunings and weeds because I have shrubberies, lawns, hedges, an orchard and herbaceous borders as well as veg plots. I have two green bins and they are both full, so assembling the incinerator (a task I have put off and put off) will be one of the next things to finally get around to doing.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/de84d530e1e14f395b0fddf3f9196990a74eb35705ab336f42a87c2e1ff672df.jpg
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We get 20 of those for £2.00 from our local Gate Farm egg supplier.
Just about to start dinner which is a simple pasta with sauce and some ciabatta bread.
It seems to be getting darker earlier. Soon it’ll be time for cozy suppers and hot chocolate.
It IS = black as your hat at 7.30. Ugh.
Getting darker in the morning too.
Mind you, given that 06:00 BST is really 05:00 GMT, that’s not really surprising, is it?
With our eldest sons birthday in mind today and his mothers tomorrow and our eldest wedding anniversary tomorrow as well. My good lady and I sat out on ‘the lower terrace’ and enjoyed drinkie winks before dinner.
It was pretty well dark by 19.30 tonight. The garden lights came on even earlier. I made myself a chicken chow mein with egg fried rice and had the last of yesterday’s cabernet sauvignon to wash it down.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2021/09/20/2109-MATT-GALLERY-WEB-P1_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.png?imwidth=1260
The Victorians would be looking at us in disbelief to see that we had messed up something as basic as the fuel supply.
And this time you really couldn’t make this up could you. Why are our political classes so effing stupid ?
I believe it is because they truly represent their local constituents…..
I recently emailed mine about the decimation of green belt and agricultural land for building homes and he replied by letter, there is no way he represents me in any way at all.
I doubt whether he actually wrote this but this was the first paragraph of his reply. “The united kingdom has a proud record of helping those fleeing persecution, oppression or tyranny from a round the world”. The usual mindless BS.
Once upon a time, GB had a proud record of protecting itself from being invaded.
He’s right – ref the Kindertransport.
But these illegal gimmegrants aren’t fleeing persecution – who in France persecutes them? Or Greece, or Italy, or Austria, or… whereverthefuck.
Of course Obs but you haven’t seen my MP have you. Hitchin and Harpenden. I’ll leave it with you.
But I have met him a couple of times, he s a nice guy but too woke i’d suggest.
Strange how many of them use that exact phrase – anyone might think it had been written for them!!
In Bath perhaps, where they seem to me to inhabit a parallel universe.
Wokanda! (It is as you know very hilly. the hills being referred to as the Wokandes…)
I think it’s deliberate. They are manoeuvring us into a crisis, from which we will be “rescued” by a digital currency, no more petrol cars, everyone dependent on electricity for their heating, scarce meat and probably a universal basic income for a large swathe of the population, delivered by the digital central currency – in other words, the WEF great reset agenda.
When Sunak suggested a central digital currency, he already said that one of the advantages would be that “furlough payments” could be made directly from government to people.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2021/09/20/2109-MATT-GALLERY-WEB-INSIDE_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.png?imwidth=1260
Don’t you start fracking Kent.
Once again Carol Klein strutting around looking more gaudy than the flowers & plants at Chelsea. I can’t stand her.
Me too. Likewise I loathe Joe Swift and the Estuarial prat whose name I forgot, intensely annoying as he remains.
Monty is about the only genuine presenter left. The rest are assuredly in the Titchmarsh tradition, spouting bollocks, greasing up to the RHS in order to obtain a lapel badge and trying to appear casually knowledgeable.
I hope the Aussie name their first new sub Horatio Nelson…..
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6dbf56a21812eb43d09fc90eb5d96a97c9cf9cded18fcb95a050d993ee2090de.png
The Villeneuve might be even more annoying for the Frogs.
Horrific….
A swarm of honey bees has killed 63 endangered penguins in South Africa by stinging them in the EYES
Carcasses of the penguins were found in Simon’s Town 25 miles from Cape Town.The dead penguins were from the local Boulders African penguin colony.Experts say the penguins were found with no physical injuries, but many stings
Investigators also found many dead bees in the area, they said in a statement
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10008295/A-swarm-honey-bees-killed-63-endangered-penguins-South-Africa-stinging-EYES.html
I saw the headline and found it stupid.
Is this normal bee behaviour? Did they release loads of bees to see what would happen?
Bees kill penguins ! Oh FFS.
And I was just watching Belle’s post about the elephants and honey bees………..
No concentration camps …. YET:
https://twitter.com/ThomasEWoods/status/1439690992119160837?s=20
If it were not for the fact that it would give him JFK/MLK status I would not catch his bullet.
If it looks like a moron, acts like a moron and performs like a moron then it might just be a moron. A bloody dangerous moron and the offspring of the mafiosi as is Nancy Pelosi.
I just hate the sight and sound of that indoctrinated globalist “pupil”.
If ever there were a justified case for extermination …
They’re woke-ing on that one.
One word reply, “TWAT!”
http://i3.cmail19.com/ei/j/B0/65C/947/csimport/Screenshot2021-09-20at17.57.48.175819.png
Well they are on the right track, ‘the she’ looks like a boy already.
Evening, all. It’s been a lovely day here so I’ve spent most of it in the garden. The spuds have been harvested, the remains of the peas, their netting and supports have been removed, two of the three tomato plants have been removed from the greenhouse because they had next to nothing left to pick, one of the buddleias has been pruned, the ivy has been cut back, one of my friends came to chop up and remove a load of prunings I’d already done and remove some branches so that I can make a start on preparing another seating area and I have almost completed weeding the main veg plot. Yet, if you look from the kitchen window, you can’t see that anything has been done! Tomorrow I hope to finish the weeding, dig up some roots, prune the rest of the buddleias and the fruit trees and plant a load of bulbs I’ve bought and been given (about 200 in all). Busy, busy!
Wow
It’s exhausting just to read that…
You need to train the dog to plough!
Oscar was shattered after his two mile woodland walk yesterday. He mostly spent his time flat out indoors – when he wasn’t flat out in the garden 🙂
You’re a hard task master.
I don’t ask him to do any more than I do myself – and I’m a lot older than he is 🙂
In dog years?
He is just slightly older when it comes to dog years. There isn’t a lot in it!
Strewth! Such activity makes me feel totally inadequate…
And breath………similar to my day, green bin day tmz absolutely filled to the brim. I’m thinking of borrowing my good neighbours scarifier for my ‘lawn’ this week. Well it was lawn once, but you know what lady dogs do to grass.
Off to Cambridge tmz for the day, then Dinner with the family for the lady of tho house’s birthday. I feel an early night coming on.
Tunisia, Madagascar, Zambia? Must get out my acronym book.
I made up a load of mortar and got a start made on enlarging a terracing wall I first started 20odd years ago!
Gee that sounds like a lot of work, I just went golfing then went and cast my vote against Trudeau.
They cannot even mess up an election properly, there have been many reports that polling stations would be unable to cope (it’s covid restrictions you know), I was in and out in about ten minutes. It would have been much quicker but I stopped to chat with several of the workers.
We all sincerely hope, Richard, that you (and Canada) gets the result you want.
I planted up the rest of my pots, still a few bulbs and plants to find homes for. Also did some hacking of bushes and OH cut the hedge. Ideal weather for garden jobs.
I’ve been plodding on, only doing bits up to now, but as I had an old friend come over to help out, I felt more enthused about cracking on. I did feel better for having made the effort.
Sounds like my own garden chores done over the past four weeks, Conway. Keep at it – progress not perfection will eventually get you there.
Thanks, Elsie. We have managed to do a lot, it just isn’t visible unless you get up close!
You can come and do mine next !
I haven’t finished mine yet!
Off for a bath, then off to bed.
TTFN All!
Shades of the late lamented Jimmy Young. Keep it up, Bill.
That’s all I have for today, Good night all.
Oh I did have a very serious pop at my local hospital trust regarding their letter I had to today with the promise of an effing phone call just before Christmas after all the problems that started in March/April !
Basically as I have suggested before it’s the FOAD period of the NHS setting in now………..eff Off And Die.
“There is “no question of the lights going out” this winter as a result of huge rises in gas prices, the business secretary has said.
Kwasi Kwarteng said he does “not expect supply emergencies” and described warnings about shortages as “alarmist”.”
Well, that’s it then. We’ll be buying candles this week, lots.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58620167
Ah, yes. Candles, oil lamps, wind up torches and lanterns. Got all of those already. All ready for winter 🙂
Matches too?
Matches and lighters (not to mention two sticks to rub together, plus flints to strike) 🙂
He did not say that the lights would not go out, he just said that there is no question that the lights will go out. Absolute certainty then.
I ordered more logs this afternoon. I’ll check my stock of candles tomorrow.
That reminds me – I need to contact my coal merchant to find out when they’ll deliver the winter fuel I’ve already ordered. I’ve a full oil tank, so all I need now is the 3 tonnes of anthracite to see me through and produce heating, cooking and hot water.
The first date available for delivery of my logs is 15th December!
My fuel should have been delivered two weeks ago, but I’ve been busy and haven’t chased it up. I do have enough to last if the winter isn’t too severe, but I’m topping it up to make sure. I regularly buy my fuel in bulk from them, so they shouldn’t let me down (the order is worth a lot to them, after all).
Why do I think those words are going to come back to haunt him?
As with most Ministerial outpourings it is ⅞ of ¾ of fu*k all and worth just as much.
Good night all.
Seafood gumbo with a Chilean SB.
I hope SB stands for Sauvignon Blanc rather than Shitty Beer.
Your hopes would be fulfilled.
Good night, Peter. I prefer a Chilean M(erlot).
Gute Nacht, Elsie.
https://www.youtube.com/post/UgwNfobtRnDvj3Q3cdJ4AaABCQ
https://twitter.com/truthbeforepc/status/1440071646325264385?s=20
Squalid Jawdrip gets more squalid by the minute.
I wonder whether the bald coot has attended the same Klaus Schwab master class in global governance as a “young world leader” as that fucker Hancock.
The NHS has been a dismal failure to all of those funding it. It is a grotesque quango, unable to meet its charter and requirement to serve the health needs of the populace. It has instead become a receptacle for psycho somatic Covid freaks. It has also raked in billions from its refusal to treat ill patients, preferring to profit from the Covid scammers.
Certainly a member of the WEF, Mr Javid.
NHS is failing as is its Minister – cut in the same cloth as the last failed incumbent.
Shocked, I tell you. I was shocked and dismayed this evening when I turned on the TV to watch Victoria Coren on Only Connect. Her head was covered in luxuriant, flowing locks of auburn hair. I trust it was a wig and I feel she probably did it for a bet. Nobody on the programme said a word about her strange appearance and I hope she looks herself again next week.
Definitely a wig according to my OH, on the basis that her hair was much shorter last week and it looks like a wig my OH had years ago.
Last week she wore a massive black bow in her hair that, yet again, no one took any notice of.
I like Victoria Coren. Champion Poker player no less.
The lady is probably making a point. I did hear recently that it is sexist now to compliment a woman on her looks.
All the more reason to do it. 😉
All the more reason to do it. 😉
Goodnight, everyone.
Good night from me!
And good night from me, Ndovu.
Good night, Conway – and Oscar.
Good night Gentlefolk and may God bless you and your endeavours.
Good night, Tom.
Good morning all – Tuesday’s new page is here.
Thank you.