Monday 24 February: Hypocrisy of a Government that champions biomass while seeking to put out domestic fires

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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

Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2020/02/24/lettershypocrisy-government-champions-biomass-seeking-put-domestic/

740 thoughts on “Monday 24 February: Hypocrisy of a Government that champions biomass while seeking to put out domestic fires”

  3. SIR – In the early Eighties I worked in environmental health in London. One of my duties was enforcement of the clean air legislation. Part of the legislation referred to the prohibition of the sale of coal by coal merchants.

    This had worked reasonably well, so that by the Sixties the trade of “coalman” had virtually disappeared. However, the legislation had a flaw. By the Eighties one could buy coal in bags as needed from local petrol stations. Petrol stations are not coal merchants, so the legislation did not apply.

    I hope that officials at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) have the knowledge and skills to draft new legislation that is easily enforceable.

    Bob Daunton
    London W7

    This had worked reasonably well, so that by the Sixties the trade of “coalman” had virtually disappeared.
    When I moved away from my parents’ home in South London in 1978, they were still receiving regular deliveries of coke from the local coal merchant. Like many houses in London, there was no central heating. Open fires were the only affordable method of heating the home.

  4. US intelligence briefer appears to have overstated assessment of 2020 Russian interference. CNN. February 23, 2020

    The US intelligence community’s top election security official appears to have overstated the intelligence community’s formal assessment of Russian interference in the 2020 election, omitting important nuance during a briefing with lawmakers earlier this month, three national security officials told CNN.

    The official, Shelby Pierson, told lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election with the goal of helping President Donald Trump get reelected.

    Morning everyone. For “overstated” read lied! The polities of the West have so corrupted political discourse that they themselves no longer know what the truth is! By the effects of propaganda, spin and distortion over the last ten years they have created a fantasy world peopled by monsters and bugbears that bears no resemblance to reality. In the United States this has mostly to do with who occupies the White House and all is grist to the mill. Putin was the weapon of choice against Trump in the last election and this time he’s been roped in against the Democrats. The truly astonishing thing is that Sanders himself believes this ludicrous charge! He thinks that he has been chosen by Vladimir Putin to be POTUS! Ironically the only person to express sympathy for him in his predicament is Trump himself who knows how this works from his own experience.

    In the real world does Putin have a preference? Well he very probably does in the same sense that the EU preferred Mrs May to Boris. Personal chemistry and political attitudes are important when negotiating important deals. Other than that he makes no realistic effort to affect the result since it is impossible to do so. What could he do that would overcome the $1B+ dollars that are going to be spent this year on political advertising in the US? Out of all the accusations against Russia for meddling in the last election not one person has been produced to say that they switched their allegiance from Clinton to Trump because of something they read online from a Russian source!

    https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/23/politics/intelligence-briefer-russian-interference-trump-sanders/index.html

    1. ‘Morning AS, what it demonstrates once again, if any further proof was needed, that both the USA and the UK have the same problem; state institutions are stuffed full of people that are acting to their Lefty/Liberal political agenda rather than doing what they should be doing which is supporting the elected Government’s programs.

      I still can not understand how we can still have so many obstructionists in place in the Civil Service, quangos & charities. Blair & Brown sowed the seeds for this and the Conservatives have never even tried to rectify the balance. If Boris is going to succeed he really needs Cummings to identify and fire the troublemakers pdq.

      3. Probably because Open Society seeks “strong relationships with officials”. As it says in their mission statement.

    2. Putin stroking his cat is as reliable a feature of global politics in Russia as winter is.

      Any foreign leaders worth their salt ought to know how to deal with him.

      I am more worried by our own leaders taking lying and selective hyping as normal public relations, and then projecting this charge onto innocent opponents. Never more so than it is with Trump and his close and special relationship with state criminals such as Bolsonaro, Netanyahu, Erdogan and the Saudis. It is no comfort to feel that the alternative model on offer with any power to sort out the world’s troubles is that provided by Xi.

    1. “It rained almost constantly throughout the summer and autumn of 1314 and then through most of 1315 and 1316. Crops rotted in the ground, harvests failed and livestock drowned or starved. Food stocks depleted and the price of food soared. The result was the Great Famine, which over the next few years is thought to have claimed over 5% of the British population. It was the same or even worse in mainland Europe”

      The inclement weather also coincided with a pestilence of oxen and cattle resulting in 50% loss of herds – (Source Monastic and Manorial records cited in “A cattle panzootic in early fourteenth-century Europe*by Timothy P. Newfield)

      More here:
      https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/The-Great-Flood-Great-Famine-of-1314/

      Oh yes and Good Morning

        1. I don’t know, but there is some speculation that those who were malnourished as children were less able to resist the plague 30 or so years later.

          1. There was also a mini Black Death during the 1360s.
            The victims were the young, not the old. Those who had survived the 1348/49 outbreak had immunity.

          2. Oh boy, the Black Death – a sort of mass emigration – did wonders for the demand for the services of the serfs/workers who survived – mind you, there was no Bosman Ruling.

      2. https://www.thedailybeast.com/when-the-weather-went-all-medieval-climate-change-famine-and-mass-death is a fair summary of what went on then.

        Much the same thing happened in South Australia, with a freak few years in the 19th century bringing marginal land into production, Normal weather patterns then re-established themselves and a lot of pioneer farmers exploiting the tax break were ruined. It was George Goyder, the Official Surveyor, who got it spot on.

        Any change of climate brings with it “funny weather”. In the UK, we are at the mercy of the unstable Jet Stream; its position drastically effects our weather probably more than anything else. If the weather is not what farmers have evolved their knowledge and market networks can deal with, then failed harvests and ruined farmers are the consequence. Without viable farmers, we starve.

        The scariest manifestation of global warming induced climate change is in the melting permafrost of Siberia. There are huge peat bogs there with reserves of methane (aka “natural gas”) that have been locked up in the ice since before civilisation. A discharge of this on the scale of Siberia would, over the period of a decade (which is how long it takes for methane to degrade), provide a greenhouse blanket trapping the Sun’s energy many times more effective than carbon dioxide. It is what keeps Venus nice and toasty. Who knows what damage to the world’s climate systems, how many failed harvests, wildfires and floods would occur in that cursed decade.

        Almost certainly, given the stress put on other life forms on this planet by humanity, which are in steep decline, there would be a mass extinction on a scale to that which wiped out the dinosaurs, and would take tens or even hundreds of thousands of years to recover from.

        What the article above suggests, is that if there has been a period of prosperity and rapid population growth, which is only natural in such times, then a failed harvest can well be catastrophic, resulting in a mass cull. The world’s human population in 1960 was 3 billion; it is now 7.8 billion.

        1. I would add that it’s the instability of the Jet Stream that has enabled the UK to benefit from its varied weather that provides both sun and rain, frost and warmth, so that a wide variety of life can be supported. We are in trouble when the Jet Stream gets stuck, since we either get months of rain, or we get months of drought.

      3. If Cardinal Blair and Archbishop Brown had been the King’s right-hand men, the losses of oxen and cattle would have been much closer to 100%.

  6. Boris turns screw on moaning Brussels as PM green lights breakthrough UK-US trade talks

    BORIS JOHNSON is planning to turn the screw on the European Union by giving the green light for trade talks with the US to begin. Express. Home of the
    Boris turns screw on moaning Brussels as PM green lights breakthrough UK-US trade talks

    Amid growing frustration at EU’s “time wasting”, the Prime Minister will next week publish his “red lines” for US trade negotiations. He is expected to oppose White House demands for greater access to the UK’s market for US drug and health firms. However, number 10 appears ready to make some concessions over food and agricultural standards, particularly over the thorny issue of chemically treated chicken

    On Sunday, George Eustice, the Environment Secretary, said while there were “no plans” to allow the import of chlorinated chicken, he was prepared to consider the case of poultry washed in lactic acid.

    1. Some of the EU-centralised British abbatoirs and processing units leave a bit to be desired over animal welfare and public health standards, as indeed those in the States are.

      Yet another case of putting up Income Tax at all levels, so that HS2 and social care and diversity management does not swallow up all disposable revenue, and there is enough to set up a decent public inspectorate immune from being lobbied and corrupted by select business interests.

      Then we can tell the Americans that unless they can show to our satisfaction that they are matching our standards, all the lactic acid whitewash will not get them a trade agreement over food.

      There must be a fair few American farmers who are proud of what they are doing, and would welcome a crew of British investigative journalists to show off.

          1. “No evidence” means that we do not know what they are not telling us.

            It relies on a criminal burden of proof being applied in a civil situation, which is hardly reassuring, considering the proportion of cases where criminals get off scot-free, and crimes left unresolved, because of “lack of evidence”.

          2. Supermarkets have their own teams of quality control checkers who go over a suppliers premises, processes, procedures and records very thoroughly.

    1. Not here, Peddy, I had beans on toast last night! (Good morning to you and all NoTTLers, btw.)

  8. Immigrants built Britain. Now their Conservative children are disowning them. Nesrine Malik. 24 February 2020.

    Immigration is now so toxic, its suppression so central to the thriving of the Conservative party, that the contributions of “the wrong kind” of immigrant – the kind that looks like Javid’s father – must be minimised, along with the value of the sort of jobs they did. This is not an unforeseen and unintended consequence of the new immigration policy. As Patel says: it is the point.

    Yes I can remember living in a mud hut with two pigs and a cow and my Father going to Skegness to welcome the immigrants arriving in the UK to civilise the place. The change was astonishing. From a backward slash and burn economy to an industrialised state in ten years. Now that’s progress! No more stabbings or gang rapes (how grateful my sisters were for that) and the police instead of arresting you for saying things that the tribal leaders disapproved of started investigating things like burglaries and even murders! These people saved us from ourselves. We should bring in as many as possible!

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/24/immigrants-britain-conservative-priti-patel-sajid-javid

  9. Immigrants built Britain. Now their Conservative children are disowning them. Nesrine Malik. 24 February 2020.

    Immigration is now so toxic, its suppression so central to the thriving of the Conservative party, that the contributions of “the wrong kind” of immigrant – the kind that looks like Javid’s father – must be minimised, along with the value of the sort of jobs they did. This is not an unforeseen and unintended consequence of the new immigration policy. As Patel says: it is the point.

    Yes I can remember living in a mud hut with two pigs and a cow and my Father going to Skegness to welcome the immigrants arriving in the UK to civilise the place. The change was astonishing. From a backward slash and burn economy to an industrialised state in ten years. Now that’s progress! No more stabbings or gang rapes (how grateful my sisters were for that) and the police instead of arresting you for saying things that the tribal leaders disapproved of started investigating things like burglaries and even murders! These people saved us from ourselves. We should bring in as many as possible!

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/24/immigrants-britain-conservative-priti-patel-sajid-javid

  10. PM ready to ditch NI protocol in hardball fight with Brussels

    BORIS JOHNSON has ordered his Brexit team to find ways round the Northern Ireland protocol, as he prepares to play hardball with Brussels in the forthcoming trade talks.

    The protocol is written into the Withdrawal Agreement signed by both sides in December and requires checks to be made on goods passing between the UK and Northern Ireland. However, it has emerged that officials in Taskforce Europe, headed by the UK’s chief Brussels negotiator, David Frost, are working on ways to remove the need for those checks. This may require new legal advice from the attorney-general’s office.

    A senior source told The Times: “There is deadly serious internal work going on about not obeying the Northern Ireland protocol.

    1. This affects cars with automatic transmission, which cannot be towed either.

      Surely, it cannot be beyond the wit of engineers and legislators to create an over-ride clutch that disconnects the transmission, allowing a vehicle in trouble to be towed?

      1. 316601+up ticks,
        Morning JM,
        May one ask, which lucky Country will become the dumping ground for redundant batteries ?

        1. I am hoping that they will start production going of the new graphene capacitor batteries, which are vastly superior to the existing Li-ion, or Lead-acid technologies.

          The great thing about graphene is that when it wears out, you can chuck it on the wood burner.

          1. 316601+ up ticks,
            JM,
            If these rogue governance parties are allowed to continue then
            the question will be asked , ” wood burner, what would that be then”

        1. Yes. Bump starting relies on there being fuel and a spark in the combustion chamber. Electric cars have none of that. The only way one can bump start one of these is by getting in enough power to work the motor. A pedal-powered generator for an hour, and some reliable means of storing the energy produced, should do the trick.

          1. I thought electric cars had a method of storing the power.
            jM, was your answer as tongue in cheek as my question?😎

      3. Everything can be done. It all comes at a cost. I remember reading about a senior management meeting at Ford where a day was spent arguing over a 4cent bolt as they needed to gat the gist under 3 cents. Ford used millions of them.

        1. All during its production run from 1948 to 1990, the 2CV was cursed with what owners call “unwinding the gearbox”. Anyone reversing around a corner on bumpy ground without applying the clutch risked the gearbox being stuck in reverse, requiring expert surgery to sort out.

          This was down to Citroën saving the cost of a tab washer on the bolt holding the gearbox together, relying instead on simply peening a normal washer with a punch to hold it in place.

    3. One of my friends has a hybrid BMW – It runs off its batteries. However, if required, there is a tiny diesel fuelled generator on board which will cut in and recharge the batteries which he says produces enough electricity for another 50 -60 miles

  12. Guy Verhofstadt demands EU take control of TAXES in budget

    The former Brexit Coordinator for the European Parliament has ordered the EU27 to replace national contributions with a new tax revenue stream, as the bloc faces a £62billion (€75billion) black hole left by Brexit. Mr Verhofstadt called on Brussels to “revolutionise” the budget after EU leaders ended a marathon summit on Friday without a resolution to the bloc’s seven-year multi-annual financial framework (MFF). The arch-europhile said the EU needs its “own resources”

  13. Is Love Island Toxic ?

    Flack, the former presenter, was the fourth person associated with the show to have taken their own life in the past two years, after Sophie Gradon and her boyfriend, Aaron Armstrong, in 2018 and Mike Thalassitis last year.

    1. I once caught five minutes of it and almost topped myself before I remembered there was an off switch!

      1. Yes these type of programs seemed to be designed to cause friction and arguments and tend to attract people who are bit mentally unstable

        1. Pumping the lips full of silicone gel to get that “trout pout” look that is all the rage is hardly a lobotomy, but it probably has the same effect.

    3. Morning Bill

      We don’t watch rubbish like that.

      However … we watched Dr Who last night for the first time for about 40 years .. and would you believe how much we enjoyed the experience.

      The special effects were clever , acting was just as hammy as ever , but it was rather enjoyable .

  14. MI5 dragged into Home Office civil war as officials deny ‘false’ claims against Priti Patel. 23 February 2020

    The security service has been dragged into the internal war between Priti Patel and her top civil servant as officials issued an unprecedented denial that the agency “did not trust her” with intelligence.

    Unnamed sources were quoted at the weekend claiming MI5 officers had reduced the volume of intelligence they show to the Home Secretary because they did not “have confidence in her abilities.”

    One wonders how much of this is MI5 censoring accounts of operations under previous Home Secretaries who were accomplices to their activities and thus bound to silence by the principle of mutual survival. If Patel became aware of these it would endanger them and enormously enhance her political clout!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/02/23/mi5-dragged-home-office-civil-war-officials-deny-false-claims/

    1. 316601+up ticks,
      Morning AS,
      It is no good trying to patch up one area when another area breaks out.
      The 24/6/2016 result was compatible
      to ramming a barge pole into the political waspish wasp’s nest ( the established governance parties)
      The whole issue needs a very,very serious top top bottom restart.
      Truth be told in my book the governing parties have been at war with the peoples in a serious fashion for the last two decades, war being secretly
      declared in the mid 70s.

      1. Was that during the stabbings, mugging, rapes and when stop and search stopped?

        Here’s a Q. If there’s an entire government department dealing with the police, what’s the purpose of all those police organisations? All the endless consultancies? The Chief Constables organisations? The quangos (well, theirs is to ensure that crime continues and protects the Notting Hill sect but hey). Given there’s a MET police as well.. what’s the Mayor of London for? What does that organisation do?

        What’s the point of any Mayoralty except duplication?

    3. Who is in a “strong relationship” with Open Society ?

      Perhaps they all are ?

      Even John Redwood refuses point blank to discuss the subject, and the slightest mention of Open Society is prohibited on his blog.

    4. The day the civil service tells the minister everything is the day we get government actually governing.

      Thus the state likes keeping government away from it’s operation to enable deniability but also to ensure the smooth running of the civil service. That’s the aim of the CS, after all.

    5. Judging by the furore, I think we can assume that Priti Patel is expecting civil servants to actually work for living.

        1. Somewhere there’s a parlisec shaking his head with a little smile and thinking ‘Yes, they always think that…in the beginning.”

      1. But they will get 2 years training in order to carry out minor procedures. On the other hand in the UK piecing is virtually unregulated which I find very strange

        1. Wonderful what you can do with the Birmingham toolkit these days.

          I offer to do eye surgery in the village using just a lump hammer and the screwdriver worn smooth by scraping the rust off my car’s bumpers.

    2. There is no reason why they shouldn’t .

      Royal Navy medical staff at sea , years ago, carried out minor operations . HM ships didn’t always carry a doctor , they had Sick Berth Attendants (SBA’s) .. There is a Handbook of the Royal Naval Sick Berth Staff (BR888) which details many surgical procedures … That is how they coped in wartime and peacetime!

    3. During her time in the Coventry & Warwickshire during the ’60s, my nurse sister was guided through a appendectomy by the surgeon. The idea being that it gave a broader base of basic surgical knowledge in case of a nuclear conflict.

      1. I imagine that after a nuclear conflict there wouldn’t be many anesthetics about, so presumably the patient got to watch the op too.

        1. The news on Radio 3 reported a case of a violinist who played the violin throughout an operation to remove a brain tumour. I wondered how they managed to anaesthetise the area whilst leaving the patient in a sufficiently competent state to play (the idea being to ensure the brain wasn’t injured in the process that would prevent her playing the violin in future).

        2. Like that lady last week, playing her violin while the surgeon poked around inside her brain to make sure he removed the right bit without taking away her ability to play.

    4. Many practice nurses already do minor stuff.
      And a male friend who requires a quarterly pellet injection dreads a doctor being assigned the task; the nurse does the job quickly and neatly – the GP not so much.

  18. Morning all

    SIR – The largest part of energy production from “renewables” comes from burning biomass. However, the main source of biomass is wood.

    For the Government to ban one form of domestic log-burning (Letters, February 22) while endorsing state-operated log-burning is another example of “green” hypocrisy.

    Dr Vernon Coleman

    London WC1

    1. SIR – Sales of smokeless fuels that have a low sulphur content will be unaffected by the ban on domestic coal (report, February 21).

      The term “smokeless fuel” belongs in the same category as “humane killer” and “maintenance-free roofing”. Whereas a domestic fire made from bituminous coal of reasonable quality will be burning brightly and smokelessly minutes after it has been lit, smokeless fuel, adulterated as it is by incombustible binder, typically takes about an hour to get going.

      Robin Dow

      Rothesay, Isle of Bute

    2. Even dafter is wood is a valuable material. Nothing from chopping a tree down need be wasted

      1. Chopping a tree down? How uncivilised!
        The only times I drop trees are either when one is in the way of something or dead trees such as elms, otherwise I just have to wait until they blow over!

  19. SIR – I have a – possibly unique – way of supplying fuel for my open fire.

    Take one Saturday edition of The Telegraph and supplements (less the sports section, which another member of the family won’t surrender), and place the complete contents into a third-hand electric cement mixer. Add a jug of water, switch on, throw in an old concrete block and run for 10 minutes on free electricity supplied by the solar panels. Chuck in a bucket of waste coffee grounds, obtained free from a certain supermarket which supplied the Telegraph, and mix for a further 10 minutes. Pour the coffee-flavoured papier mâché into an apple press, and squeeze. Season the resultant log for a few months and store in the greenhouse.

    If a log is placed on the fire last thing at night, one comes down in the morning to a warm room plus a cylinder of warm water. The residual ash is good for the garden in several ways.

    Where do I fit into the new rules?

    Graham Hobbs

    Stroud, Gloucestershire

    1. As a business venture Mr Hobbs should start investing in second hand cement mixers, apple presses and start a website. British innovation at its basic best.

    2. Wherever he fits, you can guarantee some desk pilot is already planning to make Mr. Hobbs’ actions illegal.

    3. I like the cement mixer part of the process. I’ve had a paper brick press for many years, but gradually stopped using it because of the faff of breaking down the the paper easily (and no longer buying a newspaper). Just need to persuade my son he really needs his own cement mixer for work and then snaffle all the neighbour’s newspapers before he recycles them. (Son provides the coffee grounds).

  20. SIR – Those hoping for a cashless society obviously do not belong to Women’s Institutes, the U3A, bridge clubs, art societies, lunch clubs or other such social groups. Presumably they also take no part in jumble sales, pub quizzes, amateur dramatics, concerts or fund-raising raffles: all times when small amounts of cash are needed.

    M E van Rees

    Kendal, Cumbria

    1. Or value their freedom.
      Once a card is obligatory, every transaction will log your location and spending pattern.

  21. Morning again

    SIR – My late wife died at the age of 60, 23 years after her first cancer diagnosis; she had the BRCA1 genetic mutation that increases the risk of certain forms of the disease.

    In line with probability, one of my two daughters inherited BRCA1. If she has children, she could risk passing it on – or she could have her eggs extracted, selected and reimplanted, eliminating the risk from her future line. Surely that is eugenics (Comment, February 22); but few would condemn it. Debate about these matters should not be closed down but must continue if we are to determine the extent of what is considered desirable by society.

    Neil Harvey

    London SE8

  22. John Redwood’s take on the role of senior civil servants. In an ideal world it should work as JR states and perhaps at one time in a galaxy far, far away it did function as designed.
    The last few years have exposed the fact that the democratic governance of the UK has been under a real threat and on June 23rd 2016 the UK’s electorate started the movement to dodge the bullet that is the post democratic age of an all powerful EU riding roughshod over our freedoms.
    My reply to JR.

    RAF
    Posted February 24, 2020 at 7:39 am | Permalink

    Your comment is awaiting moderation.
    All powerful anonymous bureaucrats concocting policy for powerless politicians to rubber stamp and turn into law. What a novel idea, where did that evolve?

    1. Ask him how many Permanent Secretaries are in a “strong relationship” with Open Society.

      He refuses to answer.

      1. Perhaps he doesn’t know. Do the PSs advertise their connection? The first comment mentioned CP and JR published that.

        1. I think he’s terrified of Soros and Open Society and I think he knows something.

          I’ve asked him many times but it’s a total clampdown.

          He told me to go away but then I found The Open Society mission statement which boasts that they “leverage policy” and form “strong relationships with officials and politicians”.

          So please do have a go !

  23. RABBITS:

    Leading drug companies have announced that live rabbits will no longer be used in scientific experiments.

    Muslims will now be used instead.

    A top scientist has stated that the advantage of using Muslims is they breed just as fast as rabbits, but you don’t get fond of them!

    1. Chucking it down here in Derbyshire!
      Planning to do into Derby to check on mentally ill stepson.

      1. Chucking it down here too……schools will be closed, buses taken off, panic buying…..ha ha ha.

      1. Good morning Epi

        Britain has become less of a smiley country than it was say 40 years ago . There are introductions to our society who never smile.. ever .

    4. If you just have a week off with the family, you will get sunshine abroad. Whereas, in Britain you might be scurrying around trying to find things to do whilst its belting down with rain.

    5. Sunshine (not guaranteed), seeing new horizons, different ways of life, different food, different historical buildings, and houses, etc.
      I don’t say all these are better or worse, just different. Makes a change.
      I’m off to the east coast of America in May, which I’ve not visited before, to visit Port Canaveral, Charleston, Bermuda, and some small towns in Canada. It’ll be interesting.

      2. Hope you have a lovely time, I wish I had seen places like that in the days of decent air travel .

        I have travelled quite a bit in the past , but now hate the fuss and congestion and indifference of modern air travel .

        1. I flew to Corsica and it only took an hour and a half flight time. I barely had time to finish my drink.

    8. Arguably better cuisine, climate and culture, depending on where you choose to go. To experience different peoples (not all of them good) and to widen one’s horizons and life-experience generally. And then to make you appreciate your own environment when you get back!

    9. ‘Morning, Maggie. There’s much to be said for the odd overseas visit or two, both on holiday and on business.

      I joined the Army because I wanted to visit exotic foreign lands, meet interesting folk from different cultures, and kill them.

    1. How about the other 774?
      Actually, just restore the hereditaries and chuck out the bugginses; failed politicians, undercracker tycoons, union nonentities etc…..

      2. Apart from the hereditaries, the law lords and the bishops, send the rest up to the York, House of Lords, insisting that their daily allowance is cut to just £100 out of which they will have to pay their own expenses.

        I wonder how many will bother to attend.

  27. More UK spending? Higher taxes look inevitable – think-tank

    Scrapping HS2 and cutting most of the overseas aid budget would be as better approach as well as ensuring that the NHS charges people who are not entitled to free NHS treatment. Ensuring that migrants have to have Health Insurance for at least the first 3 years in the UK would be another saving. No access to benefits or social housing for the first 3 years neither. Cyclists and those engaging in high risk sports to have health insurance to cover injuries cause by their sport or activity

    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/more-uk-spending-higher-taxes-look-inevitable-think-tank/ar-BB10j2ZH?ocid=msedgdhp

  28. alexander the (sour) grape IDs as down voter but as yet
    to make a comment, just another hit & run merchant ?

    2. Morning Jenny

      The Healing Snow by Sir Alfred Noyes.

      A pure white mantle blotted out the world I used to know,
      There was no scarlet in the sky or on the hills below,
      gently as mercy out of heaven came down the healing snow.

      The trees that were so dark and bare stood up in radiant white,
      And the road forgot its furrowed care as day forgets the night
      And the new heaven and the new earth lay robed in dazzling light.

      And every flake that fell from heaven was like an angel’s kiss
      Or a feather fluttering from the wings of some dear soul in bliss
      Who gently leaned from that bright world to soothe the pain of this.

      1. Morning TB…what a truly lovely way to start the day…thank you so much!! Beautiful words…….indeed!

      2. My boys adored this poem about the pond by Alfred Noyes when I read it to them when they were little.

        (I remember as a small boy myself, Alfred Noyes, a very frail old man, came to stay with the family of my prep school headmaster. We were all invited over to the private side of the house where he recited his most famous poem, The Highwayman, for us. What a magical experience it was.)

        Daddy Fell Into the Pond

        Alfred Noyes

        Everyone grumbled. The sky was grey.
        We had nothing to do and nothing to say.
        We were nearing the end of a dismal day,
        And then there seemed to be nothing beyond,
        Then
        Daddy fell into the pond!

        And everyone’s face grew merry and bright,
        And Timothy danced for sheer delight.
        “Give me the camera, quick, oh quick!
        He’s crawling out of the duckweed!” Click!

        Then the gardener suddenly slapped his knee,
        And doubled up, shaking silently,
        And the ducks all quacked as if they were daft,
        And it sounded as if the old drake laughed.
        Oh, there wasn’t a thing that didn’t respond
        When
        Daddy Fell into the pond!

      1. Snowing hard and we have quite a covering in the North East. Take care if you go out Bob…..xx

    4. Pouring rain and 5C here in Norfolk.
      Not the nicest of days. I would prefer some snow for a change.

    5. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RyLoxl9ttNA
      Labor’s emissions target is ‘extinction rebellion stuff’ which will cost $660B

      The US has Fox News (and Tucker Carlson); Australia has Sky News, with Andrew Bolt among many others, who will challenge and question the usual left-wing ideology and narrative on everything.
      We have no comparable tv news station in the UK that takes a centre-right stance on politics. All of ours sing from the same left-wing hymn sheet.

    6. In the NW highlands we’ve had no snow, a bit of rain and a bit of a breeze although our surrounding area has had snow. Warm but overcast. I will be doing the 160 mile round trip to Inverness today to stock up the freezer and pantry. Have a nice day and keep warm

      1. Thank you Alec……we certanly will be keeping wam and food is stocked for now. Not sure my decorator will appear and he can’t let me know because my landline is down…..

      2. That’s one hell of a journey for food. Have you thought of buying a bow and arrow and do some deer hunting?
        Have a safe and warm journey.

      3. I just realised that said 160 miles!!! My goodness, I read it as 16 miles. That would be too far for me. It takes us 7 mins in the car to get to our local food M and S and that is fine with me…..I am keeping everything crossed we don’t lose it. I would be lost, totally.

    7. Snow?? Looks more like frost… somewhere I have pictures of snow, taken at the top of my path, where it’s over a metre deep – taller than Second Son back then…

      1. Oh we don’t get shoulder high anymore…..it has been snowing hard since all morning and still snowing but it still won’t last long. Temp is 11 degrees. I think it will be gone today. I remember in my youth – yes I have a good memory – on my Aunt’s farm in Bishop…..deep snow up to my shoulders where it had drifted. Ice on the inside of the windows….that was winter….the winters we have now are little snowflakes in comparison…no pun intended.

        1. Mid-’60s? I remember a couple of winters like that when Mam was working at Middleton Hall, Wooler.

    1. Morning all.
      No backing down Boris, don’t let the greedy bstàrds steal our fish either.
      Make them buy it from our fishing industry.

        1. Sounds a bit like the fish slapping dance Monty Python sketch.
          One of my nephews was in the navy and involved in the Icelandic cod wars.
          We had enough boats then.

          1. Just not the right kind. Our warships were lightly built greyhounds, easily damaged by the tough Icelandic vessels built for work in all weathers.
            We really do not have any patrol boats. there are four to cover our entire EEZ which is nearly half the size of Europe. Our operations involves air reconnaissance. Also our patrol boats are slower than modern trawlers.

      2. Yes. No access for foreign fishermen. Grants to UK citizens for new boats and training. Grants and soft loans to fish processors for factories.
        Our EEZ will then be under fished and stocks will recover.
        The prosperity of the fishing towns will be returned to us after being stolen (with the connivance of the UK Government).

        1. Cornish fishermen have stated that they don’t have a problem with foreign trawlers fishing the same waters. They say the problem is from quota. Our fishermen are allowed to catch 9% of in channel cod. The French are allowed 84%.

          1. I’d change that to no quota for foreign vessels. A larger quota for UK boats and the result would be a big growth in stocks thus ensuring future for our fishermen, our fish processors and, of course, our profitable sales of our fish to foreign buyers in France, Spain et al.
            Why do people keep wanting to give our fish away?
            We have no free access to harvest French orchards and vineyards for ourselves. No access to help ourselves to Italian olives and lemons.

    1. All three cases seem to be clearly a Breach of the Peace. No need to bring race or “hate crime” into it. Have someone shouting insults at you in the street is not very pleasant, but perhaps a day in the stocks should give the lout a chance to reflect on the humiliation they cause others, by suffering similar taunts from passers-by.

      Thumping the tram conductor takes it up a notch; it then becomes common assault. Usually here, a suspended sentence on first offence would suffice. If he makes a habit of it, then send him to prison.

      1. Wouldn’t get a suspended sentence here, Jeremy. Might get a Community Order but a suspended sentence would be a long way down the line.

      2. Only one side of the story is given in each case, and that scantily. Was there provocation, for example a darkie spitting in the street would indeed be disgusting, and would certainly invite adverse comments from decent folk? Moreover as the spitting provoked the incident the spitter would be the one to be charged with breach of the peace?

    2. the problem with Norwegian – and other countries – hate speech laws is that they only go in one direction – against native Norwegians. Norwegian kids and youths get to hear racial slurs from migrants all the time in school and out on the street. For them, however, they cannot report it because it is not illegal.

      “Years ago, in a Norwegian radio interview, some Somali youths said openly that Norwegian girls are whores and that they get raped because they dress scantily. This is of course not racist according to the Hate speech law, even though most Norwegians find it racist.”

      1. Do you think that someone, somewhere within the vast range of human intelligence possible, will realise that one way hate speech laws actually generates racial tension – it will never in the realms of fantasy, prevent it.

      2. Sheer rudeness……why ask a question and not allow someone to answer….really infuriates me.

    2. ‘Morning, Anne, so nice to see someone put that harridan back in her tin and firmly shut the lid.

      Thank you for bringing it to our attention. Not many of us watch any MSM news and certainly not such a blatantly biased news channel as C4.

  34. A week on Wednesday will be the second anniversary of the False Flag attack on the Skripals. This will almost certainly be accompanied by the broadcasting of the three part drama series the BBC has produced to mark the occasion. Little is known about its content other than that it will focus on the travails of mythical Salisburians under the threat of an even more mythical Novichok! The title itself is moot. I would suggest that it simply be called Salisbury since this is suitably enigmatic and the connotation will be obvious to anyone who has been awake for the last two years. The introduction will probably consist of a montage of the streets of a typically sleepy English Country Town and its inhabitants; fakirs, snake charmers, drug dealers etc. with a sombre voice over to remind everyone of the Official Version of what happened. What of the content? Well this will be the triumph of the British Values of Diversity and Feminist Fortitude over the excesses of Far Right Putinism.

    Will the Skripals make guest appearances? Alas no since they have succumbed to the ministrations of MI6 who don’t want them committing any gaffes now or in the future or in fact ever. How will it end? Well it will be suitably uplifting; it will show ordinary English people in all their vibrant various ethnicities triumphing over the forces of Xenophobia and Russian Nationalist Malignance!

    2. That forecast is more than likely an accurate summation of what may be called: Sticking to the Novi-Skript!

  35. Here’s the latest round up of the number of cases the coronavirus and deaths from AP.

    Mainland China: 2,592 deaths among 77,150 cases, mostly in the central province of Hubei.

    Hong Kong: 74 cases, two deaths.

    Macao: 10 cases.

    Japan: 838 cases, including 691 from a cruise ship docked in Yokohama, four deaths.

    South Korea: 763 cases, seven deaths.

    Italy: 152 cases, three deaths.

    Singapore: 89 cases.

    Iran: 43 cases, eight deaths.

    US: 35 cases; separately, 1 US citizen died in China.

    Thailand: 35 cases.

    Taiwan: 28 cases, one death.

    Australia: 23 cases.

    Malaysia: 22 cases.

    Vietnam: 16 cases.

    Germany: 16 cases.

    France: 12 cases, one death.

    United Arab Emirates: 13 cases.

    United Kingdom: 13 cases.

    Canada: 10 cases.

    Philippines: three cases, one death.

    Kuwait: three cases.

    India: three cases.

    Russia: two cases.

    Spain: two cases.

    Lebanon: one case.

    Israel: one case.

    Belgium: one case.

    Nepal: one case.

    Sri Lanka: one case.

    Sweden: one case.

    Cambodia: one case.

    Finland: one case.

    Egypt: one case.

  37. Interesting

    Veterans Today/Damascus: Russian contacts in

    Damascus have asked us to pass on to our very good friends (really) in

    Turkey that the armour seeker/killer missiles for the Smersh, range

    90km, are deployed with all of Idlib and adjacent areas of Turkey as

    well in range.

    One salvo will destroy a tank unit or an entire battalion of Patriot

    missiles and do it from beyond range of any retaliation. Russia used

    these weapons in 2014 and 2015 to destroy the main formations of ISIS,

    done in days.

    VT’s own observation, which we pass on, is simple. We know that

    Erdogan sent units he suspected were involved in the coup attempt

    against him into Idlib. We know they have 2nd rate equipment and 3rd

    rate leaders, Erdogan using this as an opportunity to eliminate his

    enemies in the Army and then settle it all with Putin.

    Erdogan may be crazy…crazy like a fox.

    It was all theatre.

    https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/02/23/russia-deploys-its-nato-killer-smersh-300mm-against-turkey-but-why-is-erdogan-laughing/

  38. (Australia) Labor’s emissions reduction target announcement is ‘straight socialist policy’: Bishop
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ivM05CxGhKc

    Published on 20 Feb 2020
    Sky News host Chris Kenny says Labor “cannot win with a ridiculous promise” like Labor’s zero emissions target by 2050.
    Although a couple of Labor MPs expressed their dissatisfaction with the policy after it was raised in a shadow ministry meeting earlier in 2020, the policy eventually passed the shadow ministry unanimously.
    Mr Kenny said the policy could not be achieved “without destroying the Australian the economy”, but in contrast added “the cost of Australia not acting is zero”.
    “If we don’t act it’ll make no difference to the climate, if we act it’ll make no difference to the climate,” he said.
    Fellow panelist Bronwyn Bishop told Sky News host Paul Murray the announcement was a “straight socialist policy” which had “no benefit for the Australian people”.
    “The prime minister must not listen, he mustn’t listen to the socialist rantings, he mustn’t listen to the ABC, he mustn’t listen to the greenies,” she said.

    All these left-wing governments are in complete lockstep, and I include Teresa May’s government in that.

    1. Labor? I suppose one can’t expect proper spelling from descendants of convicts. Though I think they do have a respectable party as well.

        1. However, I would always try to take out his American (Grey) cousin, who is most responsible for the decline of the red.

          My Great Aunt Olive, who lived in Aylmerton in Norfolk had a quite tame red who would come to the back door to be fed. I witnessed this while staying with her in the late 1950s.

          1. I have a grey squirrel who regularly comes to the back door for peanuts.
            He’s just as beautiful as the red………..I’m not racist!
            It’s survival of the fittest

    1. It’s called an amalgam. It’s also why you are not allowed to take mercury thermometers on aircraft, and the transport of mercury by air is very complicated.

      1. Little Willie from the mirror,
        licked the mercury off,
        thinking in his childish error,
        it would cure whooping cough.

        At the funeral Willie’s mother
        smartly said to Mrs. Brown,
        ‘Twas a chilly day for Willie
        when the mercury went down.

        3. Willie in his Sunday sashes
          Fell into the fire and was burnt to ashes
          Now even though the room grows chilly
          We haven’t the heart to poke poor Willy.

        1. Aluminium foil, saliva and mercury based fillings make a nice wee battery – electrocuting the nerve ending in the tooth… OW! :-((

  43. Interesting BTL comment on Covid-19:

    davidjhill

    an hour ago

    Graham – you are better off looking at the death rate by age group. It’s only in the over 70’s with underlying problems where the death rate compared to flu is that much higher. I think over 80’s is something like 14.5%, which dramatically skews the overall averages.

    In the under 9’s I think the death rate is zero for example, or at least it was last I looked.

    The problem is not the death rate (other than for those that are affected of course). The problem appears to be the virility. it is clearly a lot more contagious than flu (though whether that is related to the fact it is a new human virus or not is unknown). This means containment is both necessary and much harder and unlike flu leads to shut downs of towns and cities and factories to minimise its effects, so the economic effect is greater.

    As winter conditions end the virus is expected to become much less contagious as it will be unable to survive in the air for very long like most viruses (however, there is also an unknown element here) and if this happens containment will be easier. That though relies on the countries with current outbreaks keeping it at bay until then.

    Also I don’t think we look for the virus to mutate to a less lethal form, I think we hope it does not mutate to a more lethal form! That would be problematic to say the least.

    Either way it’s not a great situation!

    https://app.stockopedia.com/content/small-cap-value-report-mon-24-feb-2020-cwd-rch-call-jdg-loop-tstl-axs-rtc-563741?order=createdAt&sort=desc&mode=threaded

    3. There are too many ifs and buts at the moment. The only thing we want to know is, how near are the medics to a cure ?
      The Government advert in the papers today says, don’t panic, we have everything under control. Just wash your hands three times a day.

      1. They are as near to a cure as they are to a cure for the common cold. Not going to happen.

        They are trying to develop a vaccine, but that’s preventative, rather than a cure. If you get it, time is the only cure.

    4. The current population of China is 1,437,389,186 as of Monday, February 24, 2020, based on Worldometer elaboration of the latest United Nations data. We are dwarfed.

    1. 11 degrees here too now but still snowing. Strong winds are forecast for this afternoon. Look out Spring I am coming atcha head on.

      1. I think spring is on hold for the next 2 weeks, according to the current Metcheck forecast. We are actually supposed to be going negative for several nights next week. Whether this is borne out in reality is another question.

        1. Still, once March arrives I always feel so much happier than in September – to know summer is in front rather than behind. It is a lovely feeling.

          4. Oh that was nice Tony…..thank you. I love life…I really do. Every little thing I can find enjoyment in, is a good thing.

  47. Good Morning all – I note that the leading letter today is from one Dr Vernon Coleman, now if this is the Dr Vernon Coleman the EU loathing bureaucracy hating author of many books including his diaries ( Just Another Bloody Year is one of the titles ) I look forward to seeing more of him . He used to spend a lot of time moving between his Gloucester base and his Paris Flat but gave up his flat when Paris became what it is today, his story of selling his flat and the stultifying bureaucracy involved did make me concerned for our now departed beagle

    1. When Caroline once crossed swords with a bureaucrat – or functionary – in the local administration about some completely absurd problem she tried to explain that a moment’s thought could easily resolve the problem the person responsable replied

      “Je ne suis pas payée pour réfléchir – je fonctionne”

        1. One of Titania’s unegotistical subjects gets around pouring oil on a bureaucrat?

          One of Titania’s subjects – FAIRY. Unegotistical – loses the I – FARY .Put this around UNCTION – and you get:

          F-UNCTION-ARY which means a bureaucrat.

      2. I seem to recall the name for such bureaucrats is fonctionaire – I’m sure they wouldn’t want to overstep their job description.

    2. the stultifying bureaucracy involved did make me concerned for our now departed beagle
      Are you referring to BT ?
      Do you think yer froglés got to him ?

    3. I think Uncle Bill will be alright. He once wrote a book about how to deal with all the red tape in buying and selling property in France.

        1. ‘Afternoon, little g, what is the title of Bill’s book, please?

          Best Beloved and I have plans to move to Lot-et-Garonne, maybe later this year when this house is sold.

  48. Sun’s owner reports £68m loss as paper sales fall

    e owner of the Sun lost £68m last year as newspaper sales fell and the company continued to deal with the fallout of the phone-hacking scandal.

    Daily sales of the Sun fell 8% to 1.38 million in the year to July, but it remains the UK’s top paid-for paper.

    Meanwhile, the Sun on Sunday sold an average of 1.16 million copies a week, 111,000 fewer than the year before.

    The paper’s owner, News Group Newspapers also revealed a £26.7m legal bill related to phone hacking.

  49. The anti-Greta: A conservative think tank takes on the global phenomenon

    Naomi Seibt is a 19-year-old German who, like Greta, is blond, eloquent and European. But Naomi denounces “climate alarmism,” calls climate consciousness “a despicably anti-human ideology,” and has even deployed Greta’s now famous “How dare you?” line to take on the mainstream German media.

    “She’s a fantastic voice for free markets and for climate realism,” said James Taylor, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute, an influential libertarian think tank in suburban Chicago that has the ear of the Trump administration.

    n December, Heartland headlined Naomi at its forum at the UN climate conference in Madrid, where Taylor described her as “the star” of the show. Last month, Heartland hired Naomi as the young face of its campaign to question the scientific consensus that human activity is causing dangerous global warming
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/35207cbe7539470aceb8b7860ab2d205fa7aac1567423df568cae82b3af489bf.jpg

      1. On the surface. 🙂
        I was reading an article the other day about recent discoveries in the Sahara desert.
        Researchers had discovered fish bones that had been scarred with metal or bone utensils. The conclusions was that lakes once existed in the area.
        As I also read recently that a prolific amount of African wild life did exists in the deserts of north Africa, Egypt in particular. Remains of Rhino and giraffes were found. So it seems that climate change, ‘Glow Ball Warming’ etc. has been taking effect for at least 9,000 years.
        David Attenborough presented a pretty decent programme last evening on BBC4. Most of it was about his life and animal care in his niche. It’s quite alarming how so many species have become extinct since he first set out on his remarkable life’s journey. At least people have stopped eating turtle eggs for breakfast. As he admitted he did once. In his mannerisms he reminds me very much of my elder brother in law.

        1. I was thinking more on the terms of a calming voice….rather than the panic stricken tirade which frightens children. Without doubt, the extinction of our beautiful animal life is alarming. Strange, I have just been talking to my daughter on the phone about why the planet temps are rising and I said it has been happening for a very long time….just as the Ice Age happened. I don’t fully understand the solar system but I think much of what we experience on Earth stems from it and the Earth’s orbit. I could be completely wrong.

          1. Last week…12 koalas were found dead around the area where their habitats had been cut down…that broke my heart. Darned idiots to do that with no concern for the creatures.

          2. I’ve never been able to understand how mankind in places such as Egypt, 2500 years ago almost prehistory were able to cut precisely fitting slabs of rock without the tools to carry out such accuracy. And on the other side of the world similar people were doing the same thing, even if a little later.
            Both the ancient Egyptians and the Maya were building pyramids and carving art work out of precisely cut stone when others were living in caves, under palm roofs or mud huts. And how both had extraordinary knowledge of mathematics architecture and astronomy.
            I read Erich von Däniken’s book Chariots of the Gods in my mid 20s’ and have been smitten by his interpretations of what happened ever since. I even went to London to the British museum to see the exhibits on the Mayan ‘landing’.
            I still believe mankind arrived here from another burnt out planet. Such as Mars for instance.

            Hamlet:
            What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
            infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
            admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
            a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
            to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—
            nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
            Rosencrantz:
            My lord, there was no such stuff in my thoughts.

          3. What an excellent and inspiring post…..true, there are so many unexplained miracles of science and time. I have watched many documentaries about the Ancient Egyptians as they fascinate me – a very wise and intelligent people beyond their years. Yet for all their knowledge…could only paint ‘sideways’ as foreshortening had not been discovered…..how could you build such magnificent creations but not work out how to paint with figures facing…..that fascinated me. I am making note of that book for future reference. Thank you.

          5. That rings a bell…about the alignment which I had forgotten all about…going to read that article now, thank you. As for the astronauts….. fascinating theory.

          6. I also read it, Jenny, in the early 1960s and it got me thinking, even though he has subsequently been debunked, he gives references to the Book of Elijah in the old testament concerning ‘chariots’ descending in a cloud of dust and fire in the desert. Think about a moon-rocket in reverse, as if it were landing (reverse thrust) rather than taking off.

          7. Just read the article – amazing and left me wanting to know more. I love stuff like this. Now if someone would sit and truthfully explain the nature of our changing climate with the correct scientific information….I would listen.

          8. This is a point which feminists have taken to heart. They deliberately refuse to understand that ‘Man’ is the term for the human species of both sexes just as ‘dog’ is a term which includes both male dogs and bitches.

            Hamlet was clearly talking about ‘Mankind’ rather than just men though Rosencrantz’s smile implies a reference to homosexuality.

          9. The way I see it Richard, feminists have backed themselves into a one way cul de sac. With the limits to the scope of humanity, they’ll soon have no way out. I suppose they can always go camp-ing.
            Before they try to break down the barriers. And return to reality.

          10. The Earth’s orbit does change, i.e. from a more circular orbit to very elliptical.
            The sun’s luminosity has also increased from when the Earth was first formed, i.e. 70% of the current luminosity to what it is today, at about 1% increase per hundred million years.

          12. If you stand outside my front door, you can see the gouges in the granite where glaciers slowly ground by. Obviously, they aren’t there now, or my heating bill would be enormous… so, the climate has always changed.
            BTW, Y’all are invited to come & take a look. Just let me know before you arrive, then I can get some beer/wine/cider in… :-))

          13. I would love to come and see!!! If i could just get off this sofa….lol. Yes the climate has changed continuously and I would love to know more about it…the real reasons, not hysteria laden statements but informed reasoning which I can think about and make sense of.

        4. The climate has been changing for about 4.3 billion years.

          At one point acid rain wasn’t so much caused by pollution but literal acid. It was also really hot – several degrees kelvin. Then it changed. And it will keep changing for the next few billion years.

          There’s little man can do about that.

          What we do need – and I doubt anyone disagrees – is far more recycling, far better energy sources that are cleaner and more efficient.

        5. I’d like to hear of one species that has gone extinct due to climate change and not over-fishing/hunting, habitat destruction by people.

          1. Habitat destruction I believe is the primary reason for extinction.
            The amount of forest habitat lost due to corporate greed is very alarming indeed.

        6. During the work visits I had to the Libyan desert (on the side of the Great Sand Sea), I found seashells in the sand, and there’s a lot of salt in the sand as well – bad for corrosion on buried pipework (the sand isn’t as dry as you might think).

        7. During the work visits I had to the Libyan desert (on the side of the Great Sand Sea), I found seashells in the sand, and there’s a lot of salt in the sand as well – bad for corrosion on buried pipework (the sand isn’t as dry as you might think).

          1. One of the comments:
            One of Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi’s greatest achievements before he was murdered, was to construct an underground river from the Sahara to the Mediterranean. We are still waiting for Cameron and Sarkozy to be hanged under Nuremburg Principle Six.

            Gaddafi used the huge aquifers on the border of his country and Sudan his pipe line served towns all the way to the med. And someone gave the order to bomb parts of it.
            As moisture is trapped by our atmosphere I wonder where all the water vapour and other moisture actually goes. Think of the vast amounts that formed for instance the Grand canyon.
            I see the Victoria Falls is just a mere trickle now. I saw some photos of it on line a few days ago. I actually stood in the water In the same place and have some colour slides of my travels in southern Africa somewhere in the loft.

      2. Well, not really. Having planet-changing policies being fronted by spokesmen who have not finished their education, have no life experience and have never had a job is hardly impressing anyone with common sense and who is over 21.

          1. It’s a good message. However, it does reinforce the view that schoolchildren need to be listened to by Heads of Government, be awarded fame, money, adulation, and Nobel prizes. Which is not just nonsense, but pernicious rubbish.

          2. Yes it is nonsense…..but not only listened to by Gov. but also those who should know better. Even Sir David Attenborough praised G. I feel she has turned folks away from the issue. Maybe that’s just me.

        3. Respectfully Horace, Greta’s value is not what she says. It’s who she is.

          A young woman, with passion for a subject. Obviously she knows nothing but that isn’t what matters to the Left or the press. It’s the face and persona which matters.

          Having a young woman on our side is valuable for the same reason. It’s just a shame they’re not black or a Muslim – that’d stop the Left entirely.

          1. “It’s who she is.” Indeed. However, does that fact that two schoolgirls have come to such prominence as celebrities not suggest that there is something rather wrong with our society?

    2. Time for the world to stop using pretty blonde teenagers to do their propaganda for them, and come straight out with some mature thinking.

  50. Scotsman one of six titles to be overseen by same editor

    Dressed up in fancy words but is really a cost cutting exercise in the face of rapidly falling circulations

    One editor will oversee six Scottish newspapers, including The Scotsman, as JPI Media restructures its newsrooms to focus on digital growth.

    Edinburgh Evening News editor and Scotsman deputy editor Euan McGrory will become editor for Scotland, but only for print. He will also oversee Scotland on Sunday, Falkirk Herald, Fife Free Press and Southern Reporter.

  51. Try looking at the Chinese ugly bug issues in a cool calm collected manner & not in a lab/lib/con political
    hierarchy take & promise ( we will save you all) way. Mind, I only know of one politico who takes the three Cs
    route and he sure ain’t attached to the toxic governance mob.
    As for the boris do you think he has had to many
    2 /7/19 s with a big side dish of Sinophilia ( nicked) ?

  52. Vladimir Putin opposes Scottish independence after and ‘views SNP as a threat’ after Brexit. 24 Feb 2020, 9:26

    VLADIMIR Putin will oppose Scottish independence after Brexit and views the SNP as a threat in his fight to destabilise Europe, according to a foreign policy expert.

    David Clark, who worked for former Labour Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, said that Mr Putin had cooled on independence due to the Nats forming close links with the EU and Nato.

    The international affairs analyst said Russia believed the union breaking apart would “benefit” their global agenda during the 2014 vote.

    Does he have any views on the viability of haggis production or wearing kilts in Winter?

    https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/5316132/vladimir-putin-scottish-independence-brexit-snp/

    2. Hmm! I find it very hard to believe that Putin sees the SNP as much of a threat to his plans for world domination.

      1. Looks an unwelcoming seat for those with haemorrhoids … (but it’s beautiful – where is it?)

        3. I am not sure Lewis…would have to look it up again. I was just looking for some ice images for another site. They were doing a theme about it. That one jumped out.

    4. Jenny, you should know by now that global warming, climate change or is it climate catastrophe? (sorry to show my ignorance, I still remember them saying no more snow in Scotland so am confused) causes global cooling.
      But you should never show controversial images like that because you will have the thought police visiting to re-adjust your thinking .

  55. The snow has stopped and I don’t think it will be here for long on the ground. No winds yet but forecasted for 47mph by this afternoon…will keep you posted.

    1. It’s just reached 12.0C here. And yet, the forecast still says down to 1C tomorrow night. I don’t think the modelling yet understands coastal regions.

  57. What’s your favourite Quango – for sure Cameron/Osborne/Heseltine, despite their words, never burnt any:

    It’s time taxpayers stopped footing obscene bills for Left-wing quangos
    he other day, I was asked the most piercing question for any politico: “What do you actually do?” It’s a simple query, but one that should be asked more often of campaigning organisations. Particularly if, unlike the TaxPayers’ Alliance, they dip into a £40 million pot of taxpayers’ money to do it.

    New TPA analysis reveals a number of campaign groups in receipt of public cash. Of course, a healthy civil society representing a range of views is welcome – but it becomes problematic when groups take taxpayers’ money and then lobby overtly against the government that gave it to them.

    Let’s take the recent Home Office deportations, which the elected government is mandated to carry out. Two organisations, the Runnymede Trust and the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, were recipients of public money last year. Yet both attempted to prevent a Home Office criminal deportation flight to Jamaica. No wonder reports suggested Priti Patel was furious.

    Alcohol Change UK, a nanny state group that lobbies for tightened alcohol control policies, received a total of £185,759 from the Welsh government last year. Of this, £40,593 was earmarked for “policy and influencing” and £64,940 was for “profile, communications, campaigns and events”. This same organisation lobbies MPs for minimum pricing in England, following the introduction in Wales, a policy explicitly opposed by the UK government.

    Cash has even been given out to battle Brexit itself, the core and fundamental mission of elected governments since 2016. Rosa, which was given a £978,000 grant in 2017-18, regularly argued that Brexit would disproportionately negatively impact women. In late 2019 it accused the Government of “actively selling off our NHS to the US.”

    Endless interventions by state-funded and subsidised sock puppets are dragging the public discourse to the Left, when the country is moving the other way. This may be one reason for the one-sided media environment becoming steadily more detached from public opinion. Take the Today programme: a staple of middle-class metropolitanism, it regularly provides a platform to groups calling for evermore public spending and pushing Left-wing causes.

    Groups advocating Left-of-centre and statist policies dominate the airwaves. Leftist think tanks and campaign groups have 37 times as many staff at their disposal, with funding 40 times greater than those advocating lower public spending, according to research by website Guido Fawkes. These figures shine a light on just how outgunned the centre-Right is in Britain. It feels like a miracle that we haven’t already elected a Marxist, declared an egalitarian socialist republic, banned meat and imprisoned successful business people.

    We haven’t, of course, because the electorate repeatedly refuse to play ball. But funding this remarkable campaigning client state also means taxpayers have to keep fending them off again and again. The report this week by Tax Justice UK, claiming that “Red Wall” voters want to see Boris Johnson increase capital gains tax, is a perfect example. Quite apart from their misleading methodology – using small focus groups to make claims about what millions want – the report was prepared with funding from the University of Sheffield’s “Internal Knowledge Exchange Scheme”, with input from other taxpayer-funded bodies such as the IPPR and the universities of Sheffield and Birmingham. It’s pushing a nakedly political agenda, mere months from a crushing election defeat. Funding the fighting of these guerrilla wars against the Government has to stop.

    Now, all this is not to say that nothing has been done. The anti-lobbying guidelines in government grant guidance were an important and hard-won step, explicitly explaining that “attempting to exert undue influence using taxpayer funding will always be prevented”. Yet the practice obviously persists, not least through the quangos that use and abuse their arms-length freedoms to flaunt the rules and fight the political battles.

    At the end of the day, ministers sign off this money. They can question any grant and block any subsidy. Instead of being bounced into compliance by obdurate officials, elected politicians have a duty to ask if these groups merit the money.

    With the Government’s election honeymoon just about still standing, and the new Tory Party filled with the spirit of the December revolution, the window to act is open but closing fast. No 10 probably has one year to clean up the state, get control of the cash, and end the taxpayer funded lobbying merry-go-round.

    James Roberts is political director of the TaxPayers’ Alliance

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/02/22/time-taxpayers-stopped-footing-obscene-bills-left-wing-quangos/

    1. Block it all. Leftie groups want funding for Leftie groups. I’ve not seen anything in a Tory manifesto or literature that suggests that the Tories want to continue this. The Tories are in control.
      So let us just stop paying public money to these groups and organisations. Now.

    2. Just as bad trying to find out what Charities actually do. Plenty of glossy PR junk but ask therm for measurable data and they cannot produce anything

      Where are there project plans with timescales and milestones and budgets ?

  59. National Trust switches plastic membership cards to paper

    Gosh . How long will paper card last ?. Chalk what did they use that far and eve if it were used it would b an insignificant amount of an abundant material

    The new version of the card, which will be sent to over five million members, will be made from a type of strong, durable paper

    It will avoid the use of 12.5 tonnes of plastic – equivalent to two African elephants – from around five million membership cards which are issued annually, the trust said.

    The new cards will be entirely recyclable and compostable, as well as a fraction of the cost of the old cards, which were made of plastic and chalk, a by-product of the mining industry and can be disposed of alongside paper products as part of regular household recycling.

    1. So where are they sending the elephants? I hope this is not another example of thoughtless cruelty.

    2. I have an annual membership to Hestercombe Gardens, I was issued a plastic m’ship card 5 years ago and it’s still valid as it carries a bar code , end of problem. Why the NT need to issue new cards every year I don’t know.

      1. ‘Afternoon, Datz, “Why the NT need to issue new cards every year I don’t know.”

        Possibly because of falling membership, as a result of their embracing the quaint idea of homosexuality and political correctness, which does nothing to enhance their long-lost reputation as curators of English Heritage.

      2. That’s the HQ of the firebrigade isn’t it? Went there a few years ago, beautiful place, Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll designed. Is it the Woke NT now? No more visits from me then.

        1. You’re safe to go , Its a stand alone organisation and doesn’t seem to espouse anything other than maintaining the magnificence of the Gardens and more recently undertaking the restoration of the house after the Fire Service moved out and sold it ( or SCC sold it , not sure ) for a token amount. The Cafe knocks spots of anything I’ve ever had from the NT with the benefit that dogs are welcome.

  61. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q0R2uG05KY4
    Sky News Australia: Govt must ‘take a closer look’ at South African farmers’ asylum seeker claims
    2:25
    /
    11:04

    Govt must ‘take a closer look’ at South African farmers’ asylum seeker claims
    1,567 views

    Sky News Australia
    204K subscribers
    Published on 24 Feb 2020
    Queensland LNP member Savanna Labuschagne says the Home Affairs Department is adopting a “one size fits all” rejection approach in regards to South African farmers seeking asylum in Australia.
    Since Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton told the department to begin accepting refugee claims from South African farmers in 2018, there have been an influx of applications.
    According to The Australian none have been accepted within the past year; In the past three months alone 97 claims have been rejected.
    Ms Labuschagne successfully lobbied her local LNP branch to adopt a motion urging the federal government to assist Australian citizens to sponsor South African relatives who are experiencing high crime and violence in their homeland.
    The department claims there is no evidence of systematic violence against South African farmers.
    Ms Labuschagne told Sky News host Peta Credlin families who have applied for visas are getting a “very cut and paste and one size fits all” response.

    And it shows the blatant hypocrisy of Teresa May’s administration, and the UK government for accepting so-called child refugees from France (which is where the adults posing as children were, a supposedly safe country), but turn a complete blind eye to the terrible crimes against white South Africans.
    And Teresa May thought it was perfectly fine for these farmers to have their land and property appropriated by the government, “as long as it was done legally.”

    1. And it shows the blatant hypocrisy of Teresa May’s administration, and the UK government for accepting so-called child refugees from France (which is where the adults posing as children were, a supposedly safe country), but turn a complete blind eye to the terrible crimes against white South Africans.
      And Teresa May thought it was perfectly fine for these farmers to have their land and property appropriated by the government, “as long as it was done legally.”

      Added to that, it’s seems racist in the extreme that whilst Black people can be British after a few years or by birth, these White Africans are being subjected to extreme violence for being just hard working White Africans. It’s quite possible that many of the farmers families can trace their ancestry further back than a lot of Black people who have more recently arrived in south Africa.
      These hard working farmers might be allowed to come to the UK and work in the industry. But our stupid successive government’s have spent too much time reducing the areas of established agricultural land and green belt ironically to build houses for millions of immigrants.

      1. South Africa, Eddy, now practising ‘White Apartheid’.

        Heading for a Zimbabwe life-style. Leave them to rot – no foreign aid – even in their own self-made disasters.

        1. I’ll wager that the average black south Africans were overall better off when the country was governed by Segs Blancs. Most of them had a job.
          The place is a dangerous dirty tip now. But they have a vote to be proud of.

        2. I agree, but we should have offered asylum to some of those farming families in extreme danger of torture and murder.
          Russia has accepted some, I believe, and Australia has in theory but not in practice.
          The Canadians have behaved abominally. They gave $10 million to an Islamic terrorist, but dismissed white South Africans who tried to claim asylum by saying they were lying and spreading “white supremacy propaganda.”

          1. Stuff Canada and stuff Trudeau – that’s what you get for electing a quasi-frog, leftie Trud.

  63. So…the EU tell us we must now insure ride on lawnmowers or face prosecution…..rofl…rephrase these words….bike yer on.

      1. Apparently we ‘must’ follow their rules until the end of the year. Poppycock – it is just delaying the break. Boris is being urged to tell them where to go…I hope he takes the advice on this.

    1. She’s tough, knows what she is doing, isn’t afraid of doing it, and doesn’t give in easily.
      Boris needs her around.

    3. 316601+ up ticks,
      Afternoon Rik,
      That from a man the current ersatz UKIP NEc judged to be “not of good standing within the party”.
      The present Nec are doing what the toxic trio have been trying & succeeding in doing for years, the suppression of UKIP and with the help of many a fool getting away with it.

      1. Yup. A week or so ago I suggested that there would be no Olympics this year. They should cancel all international sports events. Maybe all international travel should be shut down for a couple of months.

      2. Yup. A week or so ago I suggested that there would be no Olympics this year. They should cancel all international sports events. Maybe all international travel should be shut down for a couple of months.

  66. Woke Royal Harry

    You have to laugh as the sheer hypocrisy

    Eco-warrior Prince Harry will fly from Canada to the United Kingdom for the first time since renouncing his royal responsibilities to promote a project aimed at reducing the carbon footprint of frequent fliers.

    The Duke of Sussex will head to Edinburgh on Wednesday to host a conference for Travalyst, an online scoring system that will rank flights, hotel accommodations and tourist attractions by how climate-friendly they are.

    5. Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, Is the immediate jewel of their souls.
      Iago in Othello
      Reputation, reputation, reputation, I have lost my reputation. I have lost the immortal part of me and what remains is bestial.
      Cassio in Othello

      I think many people were genuinely sorry for Harry – they gave him the benefit of the doubt and thought he was a good chap bewitched by an evil harpy. Now they think is is an extremely stupid and boring, weak man whom they hold in complete contempt.

      2. Brash and Trash fit them well – as does Ginge and Minge. Suck it up you pair of self-serving tossers.

    4. I was talking to my computer guy this morning Rik. The parts he has ordered from China have not appeared and he cannot contact his suppliers to find out why. This virus is having what appears to be a near lethal effect on the Chinese economy!

  68. Germany horror: Car ploughs into carnival crowd in Volkmarsen – 15 injured
    AT least 15 people have been injured after a car ploughed into a carnival crowd in Germany.
    Another car of peace??

    1. Sounds like a Rosenmontag parade, the predecessor of Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday and Lent – all Christian festivals that will be an abhorrence to the Religion of Peace

      Bar Stewards!

    2. If it was a right wing extremist it will be all over our airwaves, if it wasn’t then we wont hear a thing about it.

      1. If the police refused to say who was behind the wheel and they obviously know it’s almost confirmation of what most people think.

    4. Nothing to see here. Look away, it’s not a bloke called Mo, it’s a chap called Alan, and he was looking for a loo and a snack bar just before he lost control of his car which was damaged by the evil capitalists of Volkswagon – they fiddled their emissions targets you know?

      Look over there, not over here.

      1. No mention in the article at all about the ethnicity of the driver which leads one to certain unavoidable conclusions.

  69. A warning from today’s DT for our friend Bill Jackson who prefers to have nothing much to do with them:

    Setting lynx wild in Britain could cut deer numbers, head of Natural England says

    5. I know 3 or 4 local guys who hunt deer for local butchers. There is certainly a good and sustainable supply.

    6. Good Morning Rastus

      If this is all they can come up with they need replacing. Deer numbers are out of control in many places already and they are being culled regularly.

      I would have thought that a better line might have been to point out that Lynx and “Right to Roam” might not prove compatible.

    1. Sheer scum. A few names would be interesting.

      How about arming oneself with rotten tomatoes and going to the theatre to bombard all those Equity members who want to persecute those with different views from their own?

    1. They’ve had blue plasters for use in the food industry for decades, so they show in the food if they fall off. Obviously catering for Martians…

  72. Blowing a gale here now…jeez – I am getting cabin fever. Can’t remember last little trip over to our M and S…..used to do me a power of good, a little shopping and a cappuccino in the cafe. I don’t ask for much out of life.

      1. Well that would make sure the cottage remained empty….lol. It’s not the same at home – love M and S cappuccino. I don’t venture out much as it is such a palaver but nice once or twice a month in winter, more often in summer.

    2. If you are frail, elderly – over 85 or in any other way ill, then yes, stay inside.

      Otherwise, get out, go for that walk. It won’t knock you over and heck if it does, you get up again.

    2. The activist who posted the video:
      “Alix Sophie Wilton Regan is an English actress, activist, writer and director.:

      I’m so ashamed of my country #BrokenBritain
      @BorisJohnson”

      “ALIX WILTON REGAN
      @AlixWiltonRegan
      ·
      18 Feb
      I am so grateful the likes of @Santandave1 and @stormzy exist – we need your artistry words rhythms and rhymes more than ever 🙏🏻”

      “Artistry”.
      There are words for what Stormzy puts out, but “artistry” isn’t among them.

    4. Instead of throwing them in the bin, she should have burned them. After all, there is a precedent – Germany in the 1930s…

    5. What a complete tool she is. ‘Right wing crap’ that I disagree with, and only my voice must be heard for I am righteous!

      Good grief. The facsists live on!

    1. Don’t feel so bad hubby only got 25p pension rise on turning 80 last year now that I know all that money was going to good causes.

    1. …and where’s the hard evidence?

      Surely, it’s his word against their’s and they knew what the score was – drop your knickers, girl, and you get the part – they accepted, who’s hurt.

      1. I know what you mean but….
        I use to know some top guys in the music industry the stories they told me would make Harvey look like a saint.

    2. I hope he rots in prison.

      I also hope that all those actresses who accepted his advances return any Oscars etc, they declne any royalties, and return any money they made from their films.

      Do prostitutes usually name and shame their clients?

    3. Good.
      But Hollywood has only its self to blame for this scum to be able to act as he did for so long.
      The “Casting Couch” has been a fixture there for a century and there can be very few actresses who’s early “breaks” were not due to its use.

      1. As he was taken away he was complaining of chest pains.
        Acting is part of his own makeup I guess.

    2. Ah! So we DO still have Composers who can produce good music instead of the cacophonies passed off as “BBC Commissions” that have me reaching for the OFF switch within a couple of bars!

      1. A couple of seasons ago my Choir performed his Stabat Mater along with Paul’s beautiful ‘Ubi Caritas’ which we had commissioned from him (and yet to be professionally recorded). A number of members of the English Arts Chorale are so enamoured with Paul’s Chorale music that they joined us for our concert.

        Here’s another sublime composition:

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-ucna789cY

  78. From the Spekkie. A reminder of what Maggie was put through.

    https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2020/02/priti-patel-and-the-ugly-prejudice-of-her-critics/

    “Priti Patel and the ugly prejudice of her critics | Coffee House

    Isn’t it amazing how all the woke rules for how to talk about women and people of colour go flying out the window when it comes to Priti Patel? You can say anything you like about Patel and the PC set won’t bat an eyelid. In fact they will cheer you on. Patel is possibly the only female, Asian-heritage public figure in the UK who enjoys absolutely none of the protections of political correctness. It’s always open season on Priti.

    So for years we have been told that we shouldn’t call successful women ‘bossy’ or ‘bitchy’. Those are sexist insults against women who have simply shown the kind of resolve and determination that men are celebrated for, feminists say. And they have a point. But this rule against calling powerful women bitches never applies to Patel. She is constantly depicted as ruthless and scheming.

    Witness the latest claims about her ‘bullying’. Apparently she has been bullying the poor old blokes in the civil service. According to insider reports on Patel’s various reigns of terror in government departments, her bullying has included strutting out of her office and bellowing: ‘Why is everyone so fucking useless?’ Which, to be honest, is exactly what I would say if I ever had an audience with our increasingly sclerotic civil service.

    This isn’t bullying. It’s the person in charge demanding some answers. There is something faintly tragic about the way in which high-pressure work situations are increasingly being redefined as ‘bullying’, to the extent that even seasoned civil servants are blubbing into their macchiatos over getting a bollocking from the boss.

    The view of Patel as a sharp-elbowed schemer, a ruthless invader of a world she doesn’t really belong in (hmm, interesting), is also captured in the obsession with what is referred to as Patel’s ‘smirk’. Who can forget Andrew Marr reprimanding Patel live on air for laughing during a discussion of the apparently terrible consequences of a no-deal Brexit, when she clearly wasn’t laughing at all: her resting face is simply a smile. If Marr had so ungraciously upbraided any other female politician for showing disrespect, there would have been uproar. But not with Patel. Say what you like.

    The prejudice that Patel is a nasty smirker, a kind of smiling witch, lives on. This weekend, the Guardian’s Marina Hyde referred to her as the ‘perma-smirking’ home secretary. I’m not being funny, but for Hyde to criticise others for smirking is rather like Elton John criticising people for being spendthrifts. Aren’t Hyde’s columns really just 1,000-word smirks?

    More strikingly, Hyde refers to Patel as ‘madam’. Oof. This captures one of the key liberal-elite prejudices about Patel: that she really thinks she’s something. That she has ideas, or at least mannerisms, above her station. I really hope they don’t go any further down this critical route in particular.

    And then there’s the race thing. One good rule of political life is that you shouldn’t focus on an individual’s race or heritage. Instead, you should judge them by what they believe and what they do. Yet even this civilised, post-racial ideal gets brushed aside where Patel is concerned.

    In the Guardian, Kehinde Andrews said Patel is simply one of Boris’s ‘ministers with brown skin wearing Tory masks’. What a convoluted way to say Uncle Tom. A writer for the Huffington Post says Patel is being ‘used as a pawn in white supremacy’. This utterly denudes Patel of her agency, reducing her to an unwitting stooge in a grand scheme she doesn’t truly understand.

    Musa Okwonga describes Patel as a ‘racial gatekeeper’ who acts as the public face of ‘a group of white people with racially regressive views’. Most shockingly of all, Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal suggests Patel is a product of ‘cultural eugenics’, in that she is ‘Indian in blood and colour’ but English in every other respect.

    Some people might refer to that as successful integration. Not the Patel-bashers. To them it’s a species of eugenics, and Patel — being so keen to please her white masters — is its most successful product. This is really ugly stuff.

    The double standards in the woke lobby can be glimpsed if we think about their reaction to some of the terrible things that have been said about Diane Abbott. There are some idiots on the internet who don’t only criticise Abbott’s political views — which is absolutely fine — but who view her as a stooge of white socialist men or who obsess over her skin colour and her ‘madam’-like tendencies (posh voice, etc). And leftish commentators have rightly called that stuff out.

    And yet now they do the very same to Patel. They reduce her to her skin colour. They depict her as dumb. They hint that she is a bitch, or at least a bully. There is an undeniably sexist and even racist component to the obsession with the wicked, smirking nasty woman in the Home Office.

    Some on the left seem to believe that all people of colour should share the left’s increasingly narrow, PC views, and if they don’t they are traitors. This is a demand for racial conformism, for racial groupthink. It fails to see people of colour and people of Asian heritage as individuals, with agency and autonomy, capable of deciding for themselves what political views they should hold.

    Fundamentally, what these people hate about Patel is that she is taking a stand against their worldview. In being tough on crime, outspoken about terrorism, and determined to make good on the vote for Brexit, Patel grates against the beliefs and attitudes of the liberal, leftish sections of society. She is reintroducing firmness, authority and judgement into a public realm that had become riddled with relativism and moral cowardice, and they will never forgive her for that. So it’s gloves off. They’re out to get the bitch.”

    2. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Maggie was one tough lady; maybe Priti will turn out to be the new Maggie!

  79. If this isn’t mass grooming I don’t know what is:

    From the DT:

    “Mhairi Black, Paisley and Renfrewshire South MP, visited Glencoats Primary School in her constituency with a performer called Flowjob, who read to P1 pupils aged four and five.

    Following an online backlash against the trip, Ms Black claimed the critics were homophobes and applauded the school for arranging a “great day.” However, Renfrewshire Council issued an apology.

    As part of LGBT History Month, pupils in the school’s “Rainbow Club” discussed the legacy of the repealed Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act, which was introduced by the then UK Government to ban “promotion of homosexuality” in schools….”

    1. I think Section 28 was a bit heavy handed. Having said that, the teaching of sexuality to four and five year olds is wrong.
      It is a subject that could be approached at age 14 or 15. Within the normal parameters of sex education. These people are part of society and should be recognised but not promoted.

  80. Off to make Dinner (for George that’s high tea or supper or somesuch). Maybe see you later.

    1. A measured response and good for the lady.

      I think all young women should learn how to defend themselves.

      It isn’t all that difficult against a casual attack.

      I remember at one time the advice was not to fight back because you would come off worse. Which in my mind is effing ridiculous. Especially with our new imported rapists who will happily kill you after you have succumbed.

      I hope she raked his face with her nails.

      1. Completely agree here.
        BUT

        I know I’m writing about 50 years ago, the problem is getting the women/girls to hit hard enough and accurately enough.
        Amongst other places I taught self-defence at a girls’ school for the blind.

        They had exceptional spacial/spatial awareness and other more developed senses. Teaching them to kick/punch/knee into a man’s balls with suficient force to do real damage was a problem. A cricket box and padding and a lot of laughter was one way.

        Women need to be taught to be completely and utterly ruthless if caught in a “rape-threatening” situation.
        Eyes; finger nails
        Throat; elbow, side of hand, extended knuckle punch

        Balls; foot, knee, hands, teeth

        Solar plexus; elbow

        I can continue but you get my drift.

          1. Nope. I disagree.

            They actually give a false confidence, unless one has done years of training.

            There are very few martial arts that get even close to dirty street fighting. The average yob would take down the average martial artist easily.
            A guy I trained with was a karate expert, European standard. He was killed by a yob.

            You would be better off training to be a sprinter.

          2. “You would be better off training to be a sprinter”.

            You surprise me ! Everyone needs to know at least the basics of defending oneself from physical harm.

            And the average yob as in this vid was seen off.

            The lady was in a confined space FFS.

            A Martial Art would teach you to do a straight four finger jab to the throat. Then a kick to the balls and as the attacker bent over bring the knee up.

          3. Nope.

            The basics, as you put it, take a surprising amount of training.

            Most “martial arts” classes are far too formal. They tend towards being the sport rather than self-defence.

            The video was of a slimy creep, not out to rob, but to get a thrill.

            She reacted well, but she was actually fairly lucky or very skillful.

            As noted above/below, it takes a lot to get people, particularly women, to do what you suggest, it goes completely contrary to their up-bringing.

            Even when you see catfights, punch-ups etc, outside bars, it is all swinging and hoping, very few people will do your four finger jab.

            Run, and run as fast as you can.

        2. Yup, absolute aggression is required, total violence.
          Participated in SAS unarmed combat, and the instructor was able to switch it on and off. He had control, so his killer elbow jab would stop just short of the throat, and so on. Nobody was hurt, but it was a revelation to see.

          1. Most people are “civilised”, instinctively they will not go that final inch or so that makes the difference between losing and getting away.
            I’m a great believer in giving up the wallet, the handbag, and even in extremis the virginity, if it means one lives.

          2. …and even in extremis the virginity…

            In that case Sos, since I conclude that you are male, you may need to change your pseudonym to sorearseboc

    3. Good Girl, a pity more ladies don’t take up unarmed conflict courses – loved the kick to the goolies.

  82. BBC announces that Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician and computer has passed away at 101.

  83. From today’s DT article on this subject:

    “The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said:”The Prime Minister has full confidence in the Home Secretary and the vital work that she is doing to make our streets safer and to take back control of the UK’s borders.”

    Does that mean for certain that Priti Patel’s days are numbered?

  84. A Trillion here,a Trillion there and soon you’re talking real money

    “In the meantime, however, outsiders can come up with their own

    figures. My colleagues at the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF)

    have made a start, looking at National Grid’s plans for delivering a

    (near) zero-carbon electricity grid. National Grid, like everyone else,

    doesn’t cost these so-called ‘Future Energy Scenarios’, but the authors

    of the GWPF paper

    have done so, and reckon the bill will come in at around £1.4 trillion.

    And that is just the cost of the generating equipment – government

    levies and so on are extra. It amounts to around £50,000 per household,

    to be paid through soaring electricity bills, higher taxes, and higher

    prices for goods and services.

    Decarbonising housing looks as though it will involve costs of similar magnitude. Professor Michael Kelly’s report for the GWPF

    suggests that dealing with the problem through deep insulation

    programmes is a fool’s errand. In his pessimistic view, this might cost

    £6 trillion.”

    https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2020/02/its-time-for-an-honest-debate-about-the-true-cost-of-going-net-zero/

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/Paris_Tuileries_Garden_Facepalm_statue.jpg/300px-Paris_Tuileries_Garden_Facepalm_statue.jpg

    1. 316601+ up ticks,
      Rik,
      Did the peoples really think that 24/6/2016 was game set & match, you do not disturb a nest of political rubber stampers without paying for it, we are going through the paying stage.

    2. It’s time for an honest debate about the true cost of going net zero

      Andrew Montford

      When the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) launched its report on the feasibility of entirely decarbonising the UK economy, we were told the expense involved was manageable. The CCC’s chief executive Chris Stark explained that the project ‘carried a cost – of one to two per cent of GDP – which was affordable’. His claims were noted approvingly by MPs during debates in Parliament on whether to enshrine a ‘net zero’ emissions target in law. While others complained about the lack of a clear cost-benefit case, CCC chairman Lord Deben put aside these concerns. He told the Lords: ‘the report has been recognised universally as the most seriously presented, costed effort…’ A recent leader in The Spectator said the CCC had been ‘admirably candid.’ If only.

      The truth is that the CCC has not given a full estimate of its net-zero target. The only fact it has offered is that the cost would be one to two per cent of GDP in the year 2050. It makes no statement about the cost before then. We only know this because of a response to a Freedom of Information request. So how much it will cost to get to net zero? Contrary to what The Spectator assured its readers, we still don’t know. In other words, it has not actually prepared a costing of the net zero project at all. This is an extraordinary admission given what Lord Deben said in the Lords debate.

      Not long ago, another CCC member, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Paul Johnson, told The Week in Westminster that ‘the cost of getting to net zero by 2050 will be in the order of one to two per cent national income, each year between now and then’.

      But how can this possibly be when no estimates have been prepared for all those intervening years? As Mr Johnson is not saying, and the CCC refuse to comment – or reveal the calculations behind the one to two per cent figure they quote so frequently – it is hard to have much confidence that the decision to go net zero is well founded.

      We are embarked on a journey towards an economic revolution, some might argue to economic disaster. Yet those in charge don’t even seem to ask any basic questions about how much it’s all going to cost.

      The Treasury itself has yet to complete an assessment. A leak to the FT last summer cited a letter from Philip Hammond (when he was chancellor) to the effect that the ‘CCC has estimated that reaching net zero will cost £50bn a year, but the department for Business, Energy and Industrial strategy puts the figure at £70bn’. Hammond was quoted as saying ‘on the basis of these estimates, the total cost of transitioning to a zero-carbon economy is likely to be well in excess of a trillion pounds.’ It could, of course, be far more. But we don’t know because none of the government departments involved have published a definitive statement on costs. Even the CCC haven’t done the sums.

      The Commons Treasury Select Committee, meanwhile, decided to hold an inquiry into the economic opportunities of net zero; the bill to be paid at the end is apparently of little interest. Ofgem, allegedly the voice of the consumer in energy matters, has given no specific cost either, instead turning itself into a sort of corporate cheerleader for the net zero project. A joint report from the Royal Academy of Engineering and Royal Society looks remarkably like the CCC’s – lots of buzzwords, precious little engineering and hardly any mention of specific costs.

      Only Conservative MP Christopher Chope has looked to get to the bottom of the matter, launching a private members bill to force an independent review of the costs. Its chances of becoming law are slim of course.

      In the meantime, however, outsiders can come up with their own figures. My colleagues at the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) have made a start, looking at National Grid’s plans for delivering a (near) zero-carbon electricity grid. National Grid, like everyone else, doesn’t cost these so-called ‘Future Energy Scenarios’, but the authors of the GWPF paper have done so, and reckon the bill will come in at around £1.4 trillion. And that is just the cost of the generating equipment – government levies and so on are extra. It amounts to around £50,000 per household, to be paid through soaring electricity bills, higher taxes, and higher prices for goods and services.

      Decarbonising housing looks as though it will involve costs of similar magnitude. Professor Michael Kelly’s report for the GWPF suggests that dealing with the problem through deep insulation programmes is a fool’s errand. In his pessimistic view, this might cost £6 trillion.

      Taking a more optimistic view of what might be achieved through economies of scale and so on still leaves the country having to find £2 trillion. It’s therefore probable that more modest levels of insulation will be installed – perhaps only a few tens of thousands of pounds worth per home – in combination with a switch from gas central heating to heat pumps. But while heat pumps can significantly reduce energy demand, they are much more expensive to buy than gas boilers, and the efficiency gains will be wiped out by electricity price rises. Oh yes, and they don’t work very well in cold weather. The result is that homeowners will need to find around another £1 trillion, just to insulate and switch to heat pumps; all this at the same time as having to fund the decarbonised electricity system.

      This is just the beginning. Major emitting sectors like industry and transport would need vast expenditure too, were net zero to be achieved. The total cost, according to my research, could certainly reach at least £3 trillion.

      1. That’s a No-Go, then; or a kick-the-can-down-the-road episode as each new government and PM doesn’t have the nerve to actually enforce the costs on the electorate. The elites sees green nonsense as a fine virtue signalling tool but when political suicide and a total eclipse from power looms large the politicos will not have the balls to force it through. Greenies would do it but they will never have political power, thank goodness.

      2. Do you really mean ‘die’ or is it a typo for ‘dye’?

        Am I missing some really deep irony, Tony?

    3. Not very imaginative nomenclature.
      How about:
      Native – Light but pays taxes to support the rest.
      Temporary: Sends money to relatives in the medium term.
      Darkie: Self-Explanatory.

      2. Catering staff so if they fall off you’ll notice them in the food (there aren’t too many blue foodstuffs)

    10. Archie is bound to have some bumps and scrapes at his tender age. Recalling that Michael Jagger always used to pop back across the pond to stock up with his favourite throat lozenges, I’m sure that Megain will be pleased to visit a UK Tesco.

    11. I don’t know what all the fuss is about ladies’ tights have been available in various skin tones for decades…

  86. 316601+ up ticks,
    The governance party told me on the one o’clock R4 lie spread that the NHS is well capable of handling the coronavirus along with the return & well re-established TB.
    Plus the FGM that the coalition parties have contracted out to the three monkey Co to concealsorry,deal with.
    We can rest assured,according to them that this has nothing to do with brexitexit or open borders, or the daily X channel invasion.

    1. As people on here discuss over and over again. You simply can’t trust any of the political classes to tell the truth about anything at all.
      Apparently you can no longer have your ears syringed on the NHS. You will need to go private and pay 50 quid plus for ‘the wax treatment’.

      1. That is true, my hubby used to just go the GP – now it is a private charge…result? – folks who can’t afford, risk not hearing traffic whilst out and about.

      2. Well someone forgot to tell the NHS around here.

        About 6 months ago I had a severe infection in both ears, enough to cause total deafness on one side. A course of antibiotics cleared it up, but they sent me to the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle for a follow-up a couple of weeks later, where I had my ears examined and an application of an alternative to a syringe – micro-suction, a mini-vacuum cleaner that really made a good job of it. The cracking noise as tiny particles of wax were pulled into the tube was rather entertaining.

      3. 316601+up ticks,
        Afternoon RE,
        There are also a great many straw clutchers RE, who employ the three monkey mode of voting once entering the polling booth.
        Hope also plays a major part .
        The party first attitude is as is being proved, a nation killer.
        IMO the vote to keep him / her in/out, the best of the worst, nasal canal gripping, is a sure-fired route with a prayer mat underarm, to the mosque.

  88. It’s now too late to stop the rise of French Islamism. Gavin Mortimer. 24 February 2020

    The response of the chattering classes was to stigmatise Bensoussan as a bigot, but a decade later France was subjected to a wave of Islamist terror attacks. The killers came from the milieu described by Bensoussan. A milieu that according to a secret security report leaked to the press last month has since expanded to encompass 150 districts now under the control of Islamist extremists. Their influence was laid bare in a 2016 survey by a think tank that found that half of French Muslims under the age of 25 would prefer to live under Sharia law to Republican.

    This is one of those articles that leaves me feeling uneasy though I know the score; perhaps even because I know the score! The scenario described here will come about in the UK within 10 years. It would not at all surprise me to see a failed Labour Party become a Wooden Horse for an Islamic political movement.

    A must read!

    https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2020/02/its-now-too-late-to-stop-the-rise-of-french-islamism/

    1. 316601+up ticks,
      Afternoon AS,
      Agreed, as in a prior post of mine you only have to join the dots countrywide
      of positions of power & who is moving into them.
      Shortly you will hear the call to prayer
      in Dover from across the channel then in the not to distant future, in Dover.
      Join the dots and see a mega mosque
      emerge even the silliest of peoples can recognise it as a take over plan.
      The islamic ideology larva will, IMO
      devour the host party, only way it can go.

    3. And they sneered at and slandered anyone who mentioned no-go areas.

      The globalists, far Left, and terminally naive have destroyed Europe, and it may never recover unless someone in the future starts deporting anyone who adheres to the RoP.

    4. What is it with these stubbornista journalists and politicos?
      There is no such thing as political Islam.
      There are two categories of muslim,
      1) observant and
      2) non-observant.
      If you want to label Islamic rule, it is a form of military feudalism.

  89. “Car drives into carnival crowd in German town Volkmarsen”
    Anyone know whether he was, err, one of them ?

    1. I think the general consensus was- yes, probably – as the police failed to announce any facts about the perpetrator. There may be more news by now, but I haven’t looked.

          1. It appears tht he steered around the feeble allahu-akbarriers before accelerating into the crowd.
            Obviously a Nazi. Too intelligent to be a Jihadi.
            Maybe we’ll know tomorrow that he was a Norwegian Methodist with mental health problems, a swastika fetish and his own Mercedes.

  90. Claims of Russian Election Meddling Are Still a Scam. February 24, 2020 6:30 AM.

    The fearmongering over Russian election “interference” might be the most destructive moral panic in American political life since the Red Scare. Then again, to be fair, those who prosecuted the post-war hunt for Communists had the decency to uncover a handful of infiltrators. We’ve yet to meet a single American who’s been brainwashed or had their vote snatched away by an SVR Twitterbot. Probably because no such person exists.

    Nevertheless, millions of Americans believe that a handful of terrible memes — and I mean the most amateurish and puerile efforts imaginable — on social media were enough to overturn a presidential election in the most powerful nation on earth. Or, more likely, most pretend to believe it. As Donald Trump’s fortunes have turned somewhat in recent weeks, and socialist Bernie Sanders looks poised to take the Democratic Party nomination, the Russians are once again coming to snatch your vote.

    This simple fact has been remarked on numerous times on Nottl but never in the MSM

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/russian-election-meddling-claims-still-a-scam/

    1. That’s sad. He brought a lot of hppiness and pleasure to many.
      Tusen takk skal du ha, Jens Nygaard.

  92. Nicked Comment,such cynicism

    Still
    nothing on the perp who rammed his car purposely into a crowd in
    Germany, when delays like this happen, it leads me to believe it is a
    Jihadi attack

    if it was a white supremacist it would be out by
    now, we would know his name, what colour underpants he was wearing, what
    he had for his lunch, pictures of his bedroom draped with the swastikas
    and pictures of Hitler and Tommy Robinson (NHRN)

  93. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2020/02/23/sir-michael-berridge-biochemist-behind-paradigm-shift-cell-science/

    “Sir Michael Berridge, biochemist behind a paradigm shift in cell science – obituary
    His research on the salivary glands of the blowfly shed light on the biology of disease from cancer to neurological diseases”

    One of those thousands of scientists working in our top universities whose highly specialised and unremarked research can lead to unexpected breakthroughs. Sadly he has died at only 81. In my view, the interview is a fascinating insight into how the scientific mind works.

  95. The DT is just back from visiting the Doctor’s about the earache she’s had nearly all this month and she’s got a burst eardrum from the pressure of the infection.
    There is still puss seeping out, so the antibiotics are continuing.
    Another appointment next week.

    In the meantime, I’ve another (!!!) blood test tomorrow before I see the Dr. next week

    1. That’s very unpleasant, I hope she recovers without loss of hearing.
      I hope all is eventually well for both of you.

      Being female, of course she’ll retain selective loss of hearing!

    4. How very painful for your dearly beloved .. taking ages to clear up .. her head must be really aching .

      Best of luck for tomorrow .. is it snowing there?

    1. S’pose dey got dem tribes down there in Rural Tottenham. I thought that they were drugs gangs, but what do I know.

      1. Those bastards rioted and beheaded a policeman years ago and got off Scot free.

        Lammy’s equally evil predecessor, one Bernie Grant, even had a gymnasium or some such named after him. Drug addled criminals and stabbers the lot of them.

  98. Completely and utterly off topic.

    Our car passed its French MoT equivalent today. Two more years before the next one.

    The test is fairly stringent, but they provide “advisories” on things that it would be a good idea to get fixed but are not a danger to other road users. Because the test centres are totally independent of the garages they don’t have a vested interest in failing on trivia.

    Fingers crossed, and not tempting Providence, the car will give us another couple of years where any repairs are far less than the depreciation of a newer equivalent.

    Go Bessie, go!

    2. Just had a service on my Subaru.

      I have bought many cars for less than that day long exercise cost.

      1. My first car could have been bought twice for the cost of today’s exercise!
        It makes one’s wallet weep!

        1. My first car, a lovely apple green Austin A35 cost £50. Todays exercise was about £1,000.

          Add to that five hours trailing round shops as her maj inspected various quilts – too warm, too thin, wrong colour (bedroom walls), wrong colour (master bathroom), wrong colour (kitchen walls ?) , wrong pattern or too expensive. AAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHH as has been copyrighted.

          2. No it doesn’t.

            London, the capital city, has most inner city schools with white children in a minority, generally a tiny minority.

            You claim to be a Londoner, of many generations, yet you’re actually only a frog, being boiled slowly; not seeing what is happening.

            I was born in London, schooled in London for a several years, I worked in London for 30+ years and I didn’t really notice what was really happening until I left, and return every year to see the changes.
            London is nothing like the city I knew and loved.

          3. Nice diversion but my claim is that the race replacement claim is nonsense not that London isn’t diverse.

          4. Start at the top.
            Replace in the capital, replace in the cities, move onwards and outwards.
            Not a diversion, a statement of fact.

          12. And you really think that whites as a percentage are increasing in London?

            Yep, I’m right, you’re a fool.

            PS are you Owen Jones? you really seem to have a penis fixation. Did someone remove yours?

          14. There are more immigrants in England, which challenges the claim that immigrants come here to claim benefits. Immigrants cluster were there are jobs.

          15. Me too. Parts of London now appear mostly Muslim. The women stand around in brown and black Burkhas whilst the men and boys surge diagonally across several lines of traffic to pray five times a day at some hideous mosque In Whitechapel. (They refuse to use the pedestrian crossings on Mile End Road).

            None of the fuckers work for a living.

          16. I only worked there for about 10 years (late ’60’s to late ’70’s) so when I see photos or videos now, it is in many ways like any other foreign city to me. No wandering round the old Cockney east end markets, admiring the patter of the “barrer boys” – one of the customers for our computer systems was in that area.

            I always used to buy Jill’s Christmas presents on Christmas Eve afternoon – after a celebratory lunch in the local wine bar with the gang from the office. Take a walk over to Oxford St to find something nice and not worry too much about the cost!

            When we used to regularly holiday back in England, it was rarely to London as our relatives were not there. Nearest we used to get was Heathrow. Haven’t been back in years – parents, aunts, uncles, etc., no longer with us, and sadly based on what I see and read online, I’ve no desire to see what it has morphed into.

          17. Very sensible.

            When I was young, at eleven years old, I could take my younger brother and sister from Kilburn to East Dulwich, Lordship Lane area, on my own. Two bus journeys and a tube and nobody would bat an eyelid. Would you allow your grandchildren to do the same today? I wouldn’t.

          18. No, that all changed with the rise of perverts, I suspect. Then there were the well published child murderers.

            At that age we were living in the Liverpool suburbs and we (me plus school pals) used to regularly take the bus down into the city centre and Pier Head area, and wander around, ride the overhead railway or catch the ferry over to Birkenhead or New Brighton and goof off in general.

            p.s. I don’t worry about my grandchildren these days – they are old enough and big enough to take care of me! Oldest is 6′ 3″ and broad shouldered with it.

          2. Then I suspect that you live in a bubble of white privilege.

            If you think it remains mainly white you are moving n protected circles.

            But I guess that as a junior procurement officer you don’t get out beyond the meeting rooms.

          4. Why was my comment ad hominem?

            I am almost certainly right, otherwise you wouldn’t have responded in the way you did. Childish.

            I was merely reflecting on your earlier claims that you have made regarding your activities working for and with the NHS.

            Do you recall claiming that you were instrumental in introducing the support for keyhole surgery when you might well have been all of 10 years old?

          5. I was instrumental in rolling out the training of consultants in keyhole surgery when aged 30. You made up a claim of having had keyhole surgery in the 60s, some 15 years before it was introduced in the NHS

          6. I was operated on by David Dandy, remember him?

            If you don’t, you don’t know what you are writing about.
            It was operated on in the NHS in Cambridge in the late 60’s early 70’s.
            I was a student/ recently married so was certainly not “going private”.

            If you were 30 in 1975 that makes you 75 now.
            Even if my op was in 1985 that makes you 65, yet you claim to be much younger.
            I think you are a liar.

            But for sake of argument, perhaps I was lucky, perhaps I was a guinea pig for what was he experimental in.

            I do recall watching a a “Tomorrow’s World” with Raymond Baxter where the operation was described and I had already had one.

          7. My work was in 1995 when keyhole surgery was an innovation requiring the training of hundreds of surgeons to make it mainstream ; that’s what I was instrumental in. My original statement was in response to your demand that I provide examples of when I’d be part of change in the NHS. Now please retract the liar statement.

          8. No I won’t.

            1995 is many years after you were implying that you were involved in NHS roll out. I was writing about my experiences in the late 60’s early 70’s

            And 1995 is also many years after it was an “innovation”.

            You were claiming to be at the cutting edge of this at the times I was operated on..

            Clearly you were not.

            That makes you a liar as far as I’m concerned.

          11. ‘Evening, Sos, perhaps you guys will realise why I block him. It seems, from your replies, that all the pomposity of a flaccid p*nis still abounds.

          15. The decent bits, then. Try Dewsbury, especially Savile Town. That’ll open your eyes. They’re in need of it.

          20. I fully understand that parts aren’t mainly white. You however implied the entire county wasn’t mainly white.

          23. We’ll be here all night if you continue to play the innocent, literalist half-wit. Anyone reading this column would have known perfectly well what it meant.

          25. This is Saturday night all over again. Then it was your absurd and pettifogging argument [sic] over immigration stats. There is nothing insulting in describing your behaviour accurately. It is just what it is: argument for the sake of it. If forum members are sharp with you it’s because you deserve it, scrabbling around ad infinitum with the childish “Ah, but what you actually said/implied was…”

            “Go to West Yorkshire” was clear enough.

        4. https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/ageing/replacement-migration.asp

          Replacement Migration: Is It a Solution to Declining and Ageing Populations?
          United Nations projections indicate that over the next 50 years, the populations of virtually all countries of Europe as well as Japan will face population decline and population ageing. The new challenges of declining and ageing populations will require comprehensive reassessments of many established policies and programmes, including those relating to international migration.

          Focusing on these two striking and critical population trends, the report considers replacement migration for eight low-fertility countries (France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Russian Federation, United Kingdom and United States) and two regions (Europe and the European Union). Replacement migration refers to the international migration that a country would need to offset population decline and population ageing resulting from low fertility and mortality rates.

          If you agree that it’s nonsense, you’d better tell the UN.

    3. Asthma is NOT caused by air pollution. It isn’t helped by it, but it’s a simple inability of your lungs to use oxygen effectively.

        2. It might be use of antibiotics for babies or toddlers, plus delivery by caesarian section.
          The babies are not exposed to the bacteria in the birth canal if they’re delivered by C-section, and then getting antibiotics for some infection all tends to ruin their gut-flora and immune system, just as it’s developing. It’s certainly believed to be one cause of food allergies.

      2. The cause of asthma isn’t know but we do know that pollution triggers asthma attacks, hence the concern.

    4. When it is put across to children, as he did, what does one expect them to say?

      Hell’s teeth, I can agree with most of that.

    1. Not surprising that there is a lot of “mental illness” around if this freak is what is being paraded to 5 year olds.

  102. So was the man who drove his car into a parade today, a mentally ill conspiracy theorist who believes child sacrifice happens, lives with his mum and is incidentally Muslim?

    3. Nope, he will be a muslim carrying out jihad, the duty of all muslims. You could regard the following of islam as having been brainwashed and therefore see him as not responsible for his actions. Similar brainwashing has gone on in various sects and ideologies over the years.

      1. Jihad is indeed the duty of all Muslims. It means “struggle ” and it can apply to for example, struggle against drink as well as violent jihad against non believers. But you choose to distort things by implying jihad is always violent.

        2. You are in denial and only posting here as a disruptive and frankly ignorant influence. High time you grew up and recognised the threat of Muslim ideology to our way of life.

          I very much doubt your supposed NHS credentials. Your politics are more a match for the disenchanted folk cleaning the bogs.

          1. And I strongly suspect your so called expertise in architecture is massively overstated given the fact you work for downmarket restaurant chains.

        3. I am a simple, straightforward chap, to whom you invariably choose not to respond, so I will simply say: “Go away and carefully read ‘Because they hate”‘ by Brigitte Gabriel; then come back.

          1. I’m well aware of the threat from violent jihadi. I’m simply trying to explain the actual meaning of the word and suggest that not all Muslims support violent jihad. In fact most victims of Islamic terror attacks are Muslim.

  105. Proposed Changes to Gender Recognition Bill likely to be dropped in order to protect children

  106. 316601+up ticks,
    Makes one wonder you know, the state of the nations finances & this boris chap having the shout how much of his planned expenditure has been dicktated via
    the zip ?

    He cannot use the old adage that the “grass is greener on the other side” because due to him and his political ilk
    it is,in the main,mostly bloody concrete.

  108. Only three weeks and plod have finally moved in and cleared the protesters from the main cross Canada railway line. In that three weeks, all goods and passenger rail traffic has been halted.

    Protesters are now blocking a bridge in Montreal to protest about the treatment of the local protesters who were protesting about the oil pipeline in BC.

    Pretendy PM Trudeau is still prattling on about discussions to solve the issue. Progress of his talks so far – a big oil sands project has been cancelled because of his dithering on project approvals.

    It makes the UK police treatment of the XR idiots seem quite rapid really.

  112. https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/02/24/bbc-starting-a-family-first-world-supports-slavery/
    Meanwhile, over at Breitbart, there’s an article about the BBC:
    BBC: Having a Family with Children Supports Slavery
    “Deciding to have children in the First World supports slavery, according to a BBC Three segment pushed on social media.

    In a segment for the ‘Blindboy Undestroys the World’ programme on BBC Three, the publicly-funded broadcaster’s youth-oriented channel, the eponymous “Blindboy” tells the viewer: “You think slavery is a thing of the past, but you own slaves.”

    Comment btl:
    “Blindboy” is Oirish. He’s from Limerick, which is a place that is more commonly known as Stabcity. You’d be set upon and cut to pieces in this Oirish city for as little as one of the many local nuts getting annoyed by the way you blinked.
    It’s amazing that Blindboy should mention babies. If there ever was a place where they need to stop having babies it’s Stabcity. The breeding in this place is extremely consanguineous. The average IQ in the south west of Ireland is well below 60.
    Back in the day I was very familiar with an American computer company that once had a large facility in Stabcity. They didn’t last long there. Getting native Oirish employees was an impossible task. Grade inflation is the order of the day in Oireland. There were massive numbers of “employees” showing up with educational certificates and immediately proving themselves to be in no way fit to hold them.
    Two American company executives even publicly berated the Oirish government about the high numbers of prospective employees showing up with college and university qualifications who clearly hadn’t the intelligence to hold them.
    The computer company in question packed up shop after a few years and moved to Poland where they’ve happily operated ever since.
    An amazing footnote to above: When the company announced it was leaving Stabcity a high ranking Irish minister went to the company’s headquarters in Texas, US – I’m quite sure she was the deputy Prime Minister. She was so vulgar and coarse that when she went to the company’s owner’s office she insulted and threatened him. The owner was forced to call security and have her thrown out of his building.

    1. In Limerick they have pointy heads
      Because of those that share their beds.
      If she’s yer cousin
      Then have a dozen,
      But yer sister’s good for many in-breds.

    2. Is this relating to Dell moving to Poland?

      And the lack of staff suitable in Ireland? How does that link in to slavery?

      1. Ah, got it. It was a comment.

        Of course, slavery involves taking a person’s labour without their permission or consent. When someone is paid for a job, that’s not slavery. Of course, I’d love all our goods to be made by adults paid a decent wage – but people are greedy and want cheap stuff – or, more usually they want the middle man to pay.

        (I’m utterly sick of socialist fools wittering on about Amazon paying their ‘fair share’ – so much so that with the changed tax laws the wife is taking it on again to get them out of what she describe as ‘laughable bad law’).

        I’d love the children in these countries to be in nice schools but they’re not, and wittering on about it on a TV programme, spreading utter lies won’t change that. An honest documentary about child labour – rather than a virtue signalling, cheap, hypocritical pile of sheer w**k for the ego of louts who no doubt happily took their 5 figure salaries and spent it on ‘slavery’.

        Utter cluckers. The BBC used to be decent and would have made an effort to do that sort of investigation. Why doesn’t it now?

    3. Though Shepherds care for all the animals including the dogs, they are treated as working animals not pets.

    3. John 15:13 KJV

      Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

  116. Let us prey…

    More and more people are having their doubts about the EU’s survival

    ROGER BOOTLE

    We are now in the warm-up period before negotiations begin between the EU and the UK. Predictably, both sides are digging their heels in and it looks as though there is a good chance of some sort of bust-up. Not so long ago, this prospect would have caused anguish among the EU-supporting British commentariat. Remarkably, it now seems to be greeted with equanimity. Many people appear to have come to the view, long held by most Brexiteers, including myself, that although it would be preferable to get a good trade deal with the EU, we can do perfectly well without one.

    By contrast, there is increasing anxiety about the future of the EU. When I first suggested about a decade ago that the EU might not endure, I was met with incredulity and amazement. Yet more and more people are having their doubts about its survival. Why is this? What has sustained the EU through thick and thin has been the strength of the Franco-German relationship. Optimists believed that this was a permanent feature of the European landscape. Yet it was always a fragile thing born of the extraordinary situation in Europe after the end of the Second World War. Once Germany was reunited and it began on the long road back to becoming a normal country then its subservience to France was bound to wilt.

    The euro continues to be a key aspect of EU fragility. It was always a halfway house – monetary union lite. It is now widely recognised that for the euro to survive in the long-term, it needs full fiscal and political union. Yet there seems scant prospect of this happening any time soon. President Macron pushes his grand schemes, but they receive no enthusiasm in Berlin. The euro’s difficulties are linked to major problems over fiscal policy. Outside the eurozone, governments are re-examining their approach to fiscal policy. This is not merely a limp response to austerity fatigue among the public.

    On the contrary, economists with impeccable pedigrees have called for a significant relaxation in fiscal policy. In the UK, this is about to bear fruit, I suspect, in a much more expansionary budget than could have been imagined even a few months ago. But in Germany, by contrast, there is rigid adherence to an extreme type of fiscal prudence under which the government should supposedly never run a deficit. Indeed, Germany is currently in surplus to the tune of about 1pc of GDP.

    Admittedly, fiscal relaxation would not cure Europe’s fundamental ills, which are associated with supply side weaknesses – but it would boost aggregate demand and strengthen economic performance. Brexit will make it more difficult for the EU to survive. As we saw last week, the absence of the UK’s budget contributions is causing a major problem. No member country is rushing to pay more. Meanwhile, the absence of the UK alters the political balance between the membership and is making the traditionally prudent northern countries increasingly worried about the future.

    Moreover, it is striking that senior European politicians are worried about the competitive threat that the UK will pose to the EU after the end of the transition period on Dec 31. This is why they are so keen to get the UK to agree to a so-called “level playing field”. It has been heartening to hear the clear declaration from the UK negotiating team that there is no chance of granting such a concession. Quite apart from the obvious economic danger, one of the reasons why the EU negotiating team is keen to play hardball with the UK is to try to make leaving the Union an unattractive prospect for other members.

    After all, if the UK could leave, ending its budget contributions and setting its own rules and regulations while still having pretty much unfettered access to the Single Market, what would there be to bind in other EU countries with substantial Eurosceptic inclinations? But there is a major danger in this approach. Suppose the UK does not buckle. It does not concede regulatory alignment and leaves without a trade deal and yet does pretty well, continuing to outgrow EU members.

    At that point, M. Barnier and his merry men will have done their worst. It would then be extremely difficult to argue that countries faced economic disaster if they left the EU. It is ironic that the EU establishment sees centralisation and harmonisation as the route to success. For Europe’s golden age was the period of competition between nation states. Indeed, some economic historians see this competition as the essential reason why the countries of Europe outpaced so dramatically the great empires of the day – the Chinese, Ottoman and Russian.

    Of course, there can be some economic advantages from size and uniformity. But there are also serious potential problems. When a large unified economic/political area is driven forward in a particular direction it matters a great deal that this direction is the right one. Unfortunately, the EU establishment has been quite good at choosing the wrong direction – the Common Agricultural Policy, protectionist trade policies, the establishment of the euro and the Schengen free movement zone, to name but a few examples.

    If the UK does not concede regulatory alignment and ends up leaving the EU without a deal then the pressure on the EU will become intense. Over many years some commentators have argued that the UK should stay in the EU in order to reform it. I wasn’t persuaded. I thought that our chances of reforming the EU were greatest through leaving it, succeeding outside it and letting the forces of competition do the rest. Either this would force reform, or the EU was doomed. It may take a few years to play out, but we may eventually see which view was right.

    Roger Bootle is chairman of economic research consultancy Capital Economics

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/02/23/no-deal-brexit-would-leave-eu-facing-intense-pressure-reform

    First BTL:

    IAN BIO 23 Feb 2020 9:24PM

    Brexit is in fact the UK once again saving Europe from its own folly. Thankfully this time without armed conflict. Our foreign policy should indeed be focused on encouraging other nations to leave the EU, starting with Ireland. The EU is a fundamentally bad idea. I do understand the deep distrust of democracy in many EU countries – they have had bad experiences of where that can lead – but it does remain a fundamentally better option than rule by unelected bureaucrats.

    1. I agree with all of that, Bootle is, and always was, one of the best analysts as far as I’m concerned.

      But then came COVID-19, which might well be a game changer for everyone.

    3. We should cut Ireland off. Let them emigrate to the USA. The Irish have sponged off the British for 100 years. They have bombed us and murdered us and we still let them live here without passports, be treated in every respect as UK citizens, complete with vote. We bailed them out in the financial crash and the still owe us millions which they have not yet paid back. Yet their leader had the temerity, the gall, the ingratitude and the bad manners to attempt to ruin Brexit.
      Hell mend them!

      1. ‘Evening, Horace, it’s the complete with vote that gets my goat. If they want to retain it (and why should they?) we, the residents of the UK should have a reciprocal vote.

        On that subject, since Varadkar has been hung out to dry by his masters in Brussels, should the Dail be thinking of rejoining the UK – it’s the only way to go, but…

        …do we want them?

    1. Says the man (?) who has been resorting to his penis fixation when responding to other posters.

      You really are a hypocrite, as well as a fool.

      EDIT
      That lying, hypocritical creep has changed his original post completely.

        1. Nope.
          That was the truth.
          Hurts does it?

          Who is the lying hypocritical creep who resorted to abuse about penis size? Who could posssibly be so pathetic?

          Silly me. It was AndyCochrane65

          Yes, you, you pathetic lying hypocritical creep.

          Flag away; you lying hypocritical creep.

          For ease of future typing I think LHC might suffice, you LHC.

    1. Good morning, Boss.

      Is there something you and Elsie want to tell us?
      ……Both about at 03.20! :-))

      1. How DARE you, Ms Garlands, Madam?!?! I’ll have you know that Mr Middleland Exile and I are just good friends! :0-))

Comments are closed.