Monday 27 January: Angela Rayner does not understand the purpose of local government

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here.

619 thoughts on “Monday 27 January: Angela Rayner does not understand the purpose of local government”

  1. Good morning again Geoff and chums. Another week beckons.
    I'm just doing my morning stretches while waiting for the NoTTL shop to open.
    Ah – here it is.
    Today's Monday Chuckle is about a Wedding
    A traffic cop in a small town stopped a motorist for speeding.
    “But, Officer,” said the driver, “I can explain…”
    “Save your excuses,” said the cop. “You can cool your heels in jail till the Chief gets back.”
    “But, Officer…”
    “Shut up,” snapped the cop. “You’re going to jail. The chief will deal with you when he gets back.”
    A few hours later, the officer looked in on the prisoner. “Lucky for you that the Chief’s at his daughter‘s wedding. It means he’ll be in a good mood when he gets back.”
    “Don’t count on it,” said the prisoner. “I’m the groom.”

  2. Good morning again Geoff and chums. Another week beckons.
    I'm just doing my morning stretches while waiting for the NoTTL shop to open.
    Ah – here it is.
    Today's Monday Chuckle is about a Wedding
    A traffic cop in a small town stopped a motorist for speeding.
    “But, Officer,” said the driver, “I can explain…”
    “Save your excuses,” said the cop. “You can cool your heels in jail till the Chief gets back.”
    “But, Officer…”
    “Shut up,” snapped the cop. “You’re going to jail. The chief will deal with you when he gets back.”
    A few hours later, the officer looked in on the prisoner. “Lucky for you that the Chief’s at his daughter‘s wedding. It means he’ll be in a good mood when he gets back.”
    “Don’t count on it,” said the prisoner. “I’m the groom.”

  4. Good morning, chums. And thanks for today's new NoTTLe site, Geoff.

    Wordle 1,318 4/6

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    1. Good morning Elsie and all
      Wordle 1,318 4/6

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    2. They just do not get it do they?
      The Democrats gave President Trump 4 years in which to plan for his return.

        1. Yes. They certainly shot themselves in both feet.
          Had they allowed the true result in 2020 to stand, they would have been able to run rings round his legislative programme with their political activism and Lawfare.

  7. More than 50 relatives of asylum seekers ‘join them every day’. 27 January 2025.

    Immigration laws allow those who are granted asylum, including many refugees who cross the Channel in small boats, to make a claim to let relatives travel legally to the UK.

    Refugees from Syria, Sudan, Eritrea, Iran and Afghanistan make up the bulk of the arrivals.

    Alp Mehmet, chairman of Migration Watch UK, told the newspaper: “There are huge cost implications at play here, all paid for by the public, who are seldom kept in the picture. And it doesn’t end there.”

    “Those granted asylum and joined by family members, will be housed if they have children under 18 who live with them.

    “Add to this access to benefits, schooling, medical and dental care, and we can begin to grasp the frustration and anger felt by people waiting for social housing and in long NHS queues?”

    A little bit of the truth seeping out into the public domain there.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/26/migrants-allowed-joined-more-50-relatives-home-office/

    3. " including many refugeeswho cross the Channel in small boats, …."

      Should read: "including many ILLEGAL SCROUNGERS (If we are lucky) who cross the Channel in small boats, …."

  8. More than 50 relatives of asylum seekers ‘join them every day’. 27 January 2025.

    Immigration laws allow those who are granted asylum, including many refugees who cross the Channel in small boats, to make a claim to let relatives travel legally to the UK.

    Refugees from Syria, Sudan, Eritrea, Iran and Afghanistan make up the bulk of the arrivals.

    Alp Mehmet, chairman of Migration Watch UK, told the newspaper: “There are huge cost implications at play here, all paid for by the public, who are seldom kept in the picture. And it doesn’t end there.”

    “Those granted asylum and joined by family members, will be housed if they have children under 18 who live with them.

    “Add to this access to benefits, schooling, medical and dental care, and we can begin to grasp the frustration and anger felt by people waiting for social housing and in long NHS queues?”

    A little bit of the truth seeping out into the public domain there.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/26/migrants-allowed-joined-more-50-relatives-home-office/

  9. 400610+ up ticks,

    Morning Each,

    Currently coming from above, rain inclusive,NOTHING can be trusted.

    This visitation could very well prove to cover a covert information seeking mission via the WEF / NWO
    on the best run camps in the 1940s.

    King’s ‘deeply personal pilgrimage’ as he becomes the first monarch to visit Auschwitz
    Charles III will pay Holocaust Memorial Day tribute ‘both as man and monarch’ to mark 80th anniversary of death camp’s liberation

    Well meant advice,

    Think outside the box before the political / elites put you in a box.

    1. 499610+ up ticks,

      O2O,

      I do take it the rape & abuse of British children is a softening up orchestrated campaign,
      leading to future incarceration, history repeating itself, ask Petr.

      Dt,
      The childhood sketches that capture the horror of life in a concentration camp
      Petr Haimann was just three when he was sent to Terezin – but drawing with stolen pencils helped him survive the ordeal

  11. The King’s visit to Auschwitz gives us hope in dark times. 27 January 2025.

    We have cause as a society to bemoan the state of many of our institutions. There are failings everywhere we care to look: political failings, police failings, local authority failings – the list goes on. We could be forgiven for thinking nothing in this country works properly anymore.

    But there is one institution of which we can be justly proud. Other nations envy it and rightly so.

    Where politicians too often divide us, the monarchy unites us as a nation. The King has had vast experience over more than half a century of being an effective emollient, soothing troubled waters and healing wounded parts of our society. And that work is needed now more than ever.

    The Zulu’s used to call this bongering. In fact their Kings had an official bongerer who trumpeted a whole series of his virtues before any official meeting. This looks more like desperation. A belated realisation that the UK is lurching to destruction.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/26/the-kings-visit-to-auschwitz-gives-us-hope-in-dark-times/

    1. Maybe I'm missing something, but what does this visit have to do with modern day Blighty?
      We have all known about this for 80+ years. Dire as the present government may be, I'm not sure it currently has plans for similar treatment of indigenous Britons.
      Now if his grandfather had visited in 1945, that would be a different matter.

      1. Morning Anne. They always make out that these are his personal inclinations. In reality the decisions are made by the Government.

      4. The Russians liberated Auschwitz first and the British liberated Bergen Belsen later, so on the 80th anniversary of the first exposure of the holocaust's horrors we should remember.

    2. I understand the Russian Soviet Army actually liberated Auschwitz. I haven't heard any mention that the Russians have been invited to the commemoration….

    5. "The monarch’s support for the Jewish faith shines out like a beacon in troubled times. The King attended the current Chief Rabbi’s installation. He has commissioned paintings of Holocaust survivors to help preserve their memory. The King accommodated the Chief Rabbi overnight at Clarence House before his coronation, so Sir Ephraim Mirvis could attend to his religious observance.

      Needless to say, it isn’t just the Jewish community who the King has supported for so long. He deeply admires the teachings of Islam"

  13. So Rach has returned from the WEF conference supercharged towards growth since her visit
    But in a cabinet full of shorties, what do Labour really know about growth?
    Apart from growing the unemployment figures and national debt, that is

  14. Good Moaning.
    From the DT.

    "As Britain is gripped by a prisons crisis, The Telegraph is publishing dispatches from an inmate at a Category B jail – the second highest level of security – to discover what life is really like inside. Recently, the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) found the jail to be chronically overcrowded and understaffed, with self-harm and drug use rife.

    The inmate, a British professional and entrepreneur on the outside, is on remand awaiting trial charged with non-violent crimes, which he denies. To protect his identity, he is not named. Other names and nicknames have also been changed.

    Trial.

    Trial throws up one of the most brutal experiences of all: the punishing and exhausting experience of the daily prison transports. I am still getting over the experience.

    On trial days, defendants on remand at my jail are woken before six in the morning. You have time to make a cup of tea and shave in your sink but you can’t shower on the wing. Twenty minutes later you are taken to reception. The process involves being deposited in a holding pen with other defendants, then led, one-by-one, to be strip-searched and to deposit documents (which you can’t keep with you during the journey) and collect clothes held on your behalf. (If you do not organise a suit of clothes to be sent to the prison, you will appear in court in your grey prison fatigues: I had organised a blazer and tie weeks in advance, but on the first day of my trial reception failed to find them.)

    You are then left in a second pen for embarkation, where you wait with other prisoners. Thankfully, the reception orderlies (prisoners themselves) bring you each a cup of tea and two slices of toast. The embarkation pen is a bit of a circus. Everyone is anxious; everyone has a story to tell.

    A remand prison will serve many courts: prisoners alongside me were going to Crown Courts across southern England.

    I was going to Reading. Between about 7.30am and 8.30am we were all cuffed and led one by one by staff from Serco (the company which has the prison transportation and court custody contracts) to transport of various sizes, the biggest taking about 10 prisoners, each in a separate, secure seat cage of around 20 cubic feet.

    The transports are thoroughly searched before you leave – mirrors checked for under-vehicle escapees. In my case what followed was a long daily journey of several hours to Reading. Each evening, between 4pm and 5pm, I was loaded back onto a transport and made the return journey.

    The worst part was arriving back at jail. The transport is searched again, as are the Serco staff on board. Once on the internal reception forecourt, the prison unloads and processes each transport one prisoner at a time. If three or four Serco vehicles are in front you can wait up to two hours while up to 30 prisoners are brought in, one by one. The return process involves signing in, X-Ray scanning, visiting a nurse and getting food, then being taken to a secure holding pen, before an officer takes you back to your wing and cell.

    The experience was among the most psychologically and physically exhausting I have ever known, each 15-hour day comparable to a long international flight.

    What opportunity did I have to reflect on the day’s evidence with my barrister, or develop the strategy for my defence? Very little. Was I fit and able to take the witness stand across a three-day period? Yes, just – but had my trial been longer, I wonder how I would have coped. Many defendants opt not to attend every day of a long trial.

    My own barrister had advised me to plead guilty on video link and again even on the first morning of my trial.

    But I never believed that a jury of decent-minded, reasonably alert English men and women would convict me. The evidence against me was malicious – the only witness for the prosecution lost his temper with my barrister three times while giving evidence, outraged that everything he said “under oath” was not simply accepted as gospel. CPS arguments were exposed as almost laughably inconsistent during the course of the trial. I admit that I had to do a bit of the barristering myself while in the witness stand.

    I am not sure my barrister ever quite believed he was going to pull the whole thing off, though by the last day, even he was beginning to believe. What he found exceptional was that wonderful friends and employees attended every day to support me and, on the penultimate day, testify to my good character. Most defendants, not always through their own fault, lack such support.

    Thank God one thing works in our justice system – the jury. The one part which does not contain jaded and cynical legal professionals. It took the jury less than an hour, including a 30-minute lunch break, to unanimously acquit me.

    I can honestly say that I was perhaps the only person who was not surprised.

    There is a huge irony here: if I ever posed a danger to others in the past, which I do not believe, I am so incensed by what I have experienced – being imprisoned for so long, prevented from seeing my children and stripped of any means of supporting myself – that I believe I now possibly am prone to impulsive rage. How will I deal with this now I am a free man?

    This is the final Secret Prisoner diary. We understand that many readers will be keen to know the details of his identity and case and hope that we will be able to disclose these facts in due course. In the meantime the Secret Prisoner is keen to express his great gratitude to Telegraph readers who have followed his case in the months he spent on remand and so gave him a structure and purpose at a hugely difficult time."

      2. I wouldn't go that far JB.
        A few, years ago I was honoured to have been selected for Jury service.
        After the trial and the verdict the 12 had to be escorted from the rear of the building.
        During the trial we were subjected to staring from relatives and friends of the accused.
        Found guilty of course.

    2. And I wonder how much of the money he has been forced to pay out on his defence he will be able to recover?

    3. Thank God one thing works in our justice system – the jury.
      Starmer to Spad.. "See about abolishing this relic of the past."

    4. His series has certainly been eye-opening. And I'm sure we can all understand any rage he might feel.
      I'm guessing the system expects him to re-build his life and just put it all behind him, right? No offence, eh, mistakes made etc. That's a price of living in an organised society that most of us pray we will never have to pay.

      1. I would have said that neither has priority, but Rule 155 of the Highway Code says:- "Give way to road users coming uphill whenever you can. If necessary, reverse until you reach a passing place to let the other vehicle pass."

  16. This made Oi larf:
    Driving in Florida
    SIR – At the age of 82, I have just obtained my Florida driving licence (Letters, January 25). I was somewhat nervous at the prospect of taking the test, but I needn’t have worried.

    The practical section took place in a large car park with various road signs scattered about and no other vehicles. It took less than 10 minutes

    On querying why the test wasn’t taken on the road, I was informed with a straight face that too many examiners were getting injured during the exams – hence the move to a quiet car park.

    Chris Bell
    Sutton Coldfield

  17. Morning, all Y'all. Overcast. Slight melting yesterday evening coupled to overnight freeze meant sheet ice on the road – even the gritting tractor reversed down the hill, so he got fresh grit under his tyres! Still, some idiot had parked at the bottom on the corner, so anyone sliding down will use the car as a cushion between them and the cliff!

  18. Good morning all.
    Dull but dry start today after heavy overnight rain.
    2.8°C when I checked half an hour ago. Yesterday's Max and Min were 6.1° and 2.2°C respectively.

    A dull start with a road block going on across the road. The council are finally catching up with a huge amount of neglected maintenance on the Via Gellia.

  19. Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, something that the MSM and political pundits get very wrong indeed, as shown in Today is Holocaust Memorial Day – But the MSM Gets it Completely Wrong , which argues that there a many disturbing similarities between modern Globalism and the National Socialist totalitarianism that caused the Holocaust.

    And we recommend senior clinician Xandra H’s article More News From The NHS , which gives an insight on why the NHS is so dysfunctional.

    Energy watch 07.30. Demand: 38.907GW. Supply: Hydrocarbons 24.3%; Wind 38.7%; Imports 15.6%; Biomass 6.7% and Nuclear 11.7%. Solar: 0%.

    We are importing – very expensively – over 15% of our demand for electric power from the continent despite drawing down on pumped storage capacity. Of the nominal demand of 39GW, Britain is only producing 32GW.

    freespeechbacklash.com

  20. SIR – Jeremy Prescott (Letters, January 23) suggests that the proposed merger and restructuring of Rutland, Leicestershire and Leicester City councils “will ensure significant savings to improve service delivery, as well as continued representation at local level”.

    Such savings will be non-existent: the cost of restructuring, rebranding and repopulating the democratic institutions will consume any perceived financial benefit.

    Take the changes made in Cumbria, whereby Cumbria county council was abolished and replaced by two new unitary authorities: Cumberland council and Westmorland and Furness council. These changes were forced through by the then housing secretaries Robert Jenrick and Michael Gove; any considerations of historical boundaries, cultural differences and geography were cast aside.
    I doubt whether our current two councils communicate well. Service delivery hasn’t noticeably changed.

    Why not have an honest debate about Labour’s long-held philosophy of regional government? It didn’t work for the regional assemblies in the 2000s, so what has changed in the intervening years to persuade the Left’s policymakers that it is worth another go?

    Tony Wolfe
    Penrith, Westmorland and Furness

    For the same reason as in 2000. Because the EU require it.

      1. Same with the European defence force. Whatever the EU want Keir will give it to them while pretending to fight it.

        1. The Chagos precedent suggest that he will pay the EU for the privilege of giving away our sovereignty

          1. £500 billion is being requested as a joint fund. Of course we will end up paying most of that.

        2. Hedgehogs again.

          The Starmer Method is best illustrated by how I got to learn of the man.

          Regents Park, which is in Starmer's North London constituency, had the only hedgehog sanctuary in London. The charming little creatures do well in London from the gardens, much less poisoned than they are in most country fields and without their natural predators – badgers. However, they are prey to road traffic and are often found injured.

          The hedgehog sanctuary served as a safe place for them to recover, as well as the amenity for local children, who love cuddly and cute little animals. Actually they like tigers too, but they are not allowed to stroke these.

          When business interests pushed HS2 through, for growth and jobs naturally, the hedgehog sanctuary was condemned because it was in the way of facilities needed for the building contractors.

          During his election campaign, Starmer pledged to fight the obliteration of the much-loved hedgehog sanctuary, and stood on a platform of putting local people before business interests, especially when it came to cute little animals. Starmer got elected comfortably.

          Guess what happened next… After a few weeks in Westminster, there was a vote in Parliament to allocate extra money to proceed with HS2, and to cancel any objections from locals over loss of amenities, the huge cost to the taxpayer and environmental damage that was deemed "inappropriate" during the Review. Contrary to what he pledged to his constituents, he voted in favour of HS2, and the hedgehog sanctuary was duly bulldozed to make way for a vehicle park for contractors' vehicles.

          This is the character of the man who is now our Prime Minister.

    2. Surrey County Council voted 42-22 to cancel May's elections. It's almost as if they were afraid of something.

        2. I thought the elections were a legal requirement.
          There should be an uprising in response.

      2. Surrey was long a negligent self-serving organisation with the fashionable remit of extracting large amounts of tax directed then to favourites whilst making tough decisions about public services.

        Over the years (and something I was involved in during the 1980s), popular power has shifted from the Conservatives to the Liberal Democrats, with very little Labour engagement.

        I can only deduce that the present Starmer Government is far more at home with the Tories than with the Lib Dems, especially the latters' bothersome parochials who do not share their love of the World Economic Forum or Donald Trump's love of tyrant authoritarians and favoured business cronies.

        I have long suspected that woke theology is a ploy by the globalist cabal to discredit their opponents, and the idiots on the Left played right into their hands.

    3. And what the people of Rutland want is as irrelevant as what the people of the Chagos Islands want.

      1. I haven't smoked a cigarette for 37 years and 27 days. I would love to have one but I dare not because I am still an addict and if I had just one it would be the beginning of the end.

        I also love my pipe but I am not addicted to it.

        1. Genuine questions – do you and/or pipe smokers in general inhale the smoke? If so, I dread to think what damage it does to lungs; if not, how do you get a kick? Is it just the puffing that gives pleasure (a bit like chewing gum perhaps)?

    3. The printing on the packets was amended to read

      w R e N s are issued duty-free for use by Officers and Men of the Royal Navy

  24. G'Day all,

    Met Office played a blinder with their forecast today. They didn't mention the thunderstorm currently darkening the sky overhead Fiscal's Folly. It' supposed to be a showery morning with a blustery Sou'-Wester, 6-7℃. Unusual weather for January. Told you the climate's changing.

    Schadenfreude is delicious, isn't it?

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6d214eef2b2461390e389a15e163d096dd4f1020e2a06fc689c960746b771b91.png
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/26/dale-vinces-empire-slumps-loss-vegan-gas-project-writedown/

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f372acfa391ac9c28168d891fbf939013cf0cf4a257991a46c3033f0e96cbb6a.png

    3. Socialists receiving massive donations from a capitalist socialist?

      An oxymoron if ever I heard one.

  25. Thought for the day supplied by a BTL Comment:

    'If Global Warming wasn't real, we would still have the Netherlands.'

  26. Morning all 🙂😊
    Broken cloud blowing across from the west been raining and 6 c.
    Perhaps Angela doesn't understand the purpose of being reasonable and tempting fate by attracting residents to support her theory's.
    But let's face it, she's pushing her luck with the 90% far right band wagon outside of Wastemonster……those in the real world.

  27. Good morning all,

    An hour ago, an enormous clap of thunder made us jump out of our skin, set the dog off barking and the sky became the darkest ever for about five minutes .

    Clear sky, well not quite now , strong wind . 7c

    Feels like March weather.

    1. We seem to be having March weather too. But it's still January. Hope the grass doesn't start growing!

        1. I've got a cluster of snowdrops coming up where I've been clearing the bankside the tree fellers cleared.

  29. The news is grim, remembering the death camps being liberated 80 years ago.

    Horrors are happening all the time these days .

    Hatred and exclusion is happening here .. in a minor way free speech is being hammered , and those who dare to speak out about the murders that are happening now, stabbings etc .. have now resulted in imprisonment for thought crime .

    Thousands of elderly people are being cancelled , either because by their deaths in hospital corridors or by being neglected in their own homes .

    ( today is day one of a triage system at our local surgery , email them for an appointment , then answer questions on an online form about your reason for seeing the doctor , the response will not be immediate)

    Strangely and appallingly , children are now the victims of incoming primitives for sexual gratification and hate , how odd that the governments response is "Ha ha , remove extremist material from the net , and ban Amazon from selling knives "

    Rainy days and Mondays. always get me down.

    2. Blocking free speech and cancelling elections: UK is becoming more fascist by the day.
      (lower case F is deliberate – they don't deserve the respect of an upper case F as in I don't give an F for them…

    3. Our GP surgery has brought in an online triage system (which I haven't bothered looking at) but I was able to circumvent it last week by phoning and answering the questions which the receptionist said would have been the same on the Anima system) we got an appointment for Thursday, by ringing last Monday.

  30. Reposted from late last night

    Monday 27th January, 2025

    Citroën 1

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/439b353ba4408875516bc2574b528a13c7446d290d79deaa85a4ff05373ae337.png
    A new Sunset Stripper on the block!

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f15108925be65a9a2608d8e25edca14c950fe7218c958fddb1d38927a117d0b9.png
    With very best wishes from,

    Caroline and Rastus

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/39b26e021f97f44c5b7072cef86d613f9a4c36000f7e87c3e1e55986411f7949.png

    1. Letters to the Editor
      Angela Rayner does not understand the purpose of local government
      Plus: Tracking migration; second home laws; Europe’s defence; driving in Florida; Heathrow alternatives; and supporting regional arts

      Letters to the Editor 26 January 2025 10:00pm GMT

      SIR – Angela Rayner, the Housing Secretary, wants to cover the country with larger councils looking after 500,000 people (report, January 18). This defies the whole democratic purpose of local government, which is that places should be run by local people who know their area well.

      I spent 16 years as a councillor for the Borough of Epsom and Ewell in Surrey, which was – and remains – controlled by independent councillors selected by local residents’ associations. In the main, a small or large town should be able to manage its own affairs, especially as most functions are tendered for by contractors.

      Where a greater scale is needed, local authorities can voluntarily join together to provide particular services. Country areas with villages usually look towards the nearest town and can be linked in with its council.

      Local government should be true to its description: local.

      Michael Staples
      Seaford, East Sussex

      1. It's bad enough parish councils making decisions based on local knowledge only to be overruled at count level.

  35. Brave New World….

    In a matter of days, the news of China’s AI sensation, DeepSeek R1, has gone from a gentle breeze to a Force 5 hurricane. It’s clear now that no one in Silicon Valley or Washington DC had the slightest idea that their world was about to be turned upside-down by an innovative new product that would shift the geopolitical plates further eastward. But that, in fact, is what has happened. And it’s not simply because DeepSeek’s latest version matches or exceeds the performance of America’s best model, OpenAI; but because it is cheaper, more accessible and more transparent. This is AI for everyone regardless of their station or income. And its sudden emergence from ‘out of the blue’ has cast doubts on the ability of western tech giants to anticipate the capability of their competitors or to lead an industry that is essential for Washington to preserve its ever-loosening grip on global power. Here’s a brief recap from Venture Beat:

    ….thanks to the release of DeepSeek R1, a new large language model that performs “reasoning” similar to OpenAI’s current best-available model o1 — taking multiple seconds or minutes to answer hard questions and solve complex problems as it reflects on its own analysis in a step-by-step, or “chain of thought” fashion.

    Not only that, but DeepSeek R1 scored as high or higher than OpenAI’s o1 on a variety of third-party benchmarks…, and was reportedly trained at a fraction of the cost…, with far fewer graphics processing units (GPU) under a strict embargo imposed by the U.S., OpenAI’s home turf.

    But unlike o1, which is available only to paying ChatGPT subscribers of the Plus tier ($20 per month) and more expensive tiers (such as Pro at $200 per month), DeepSeek R1 was released as a fully open source model, which also explains why it has quickly rocketed up the charts of AI code sharing community Hugging Face’s most downloaded and active models.

    – Why everyone in AI is freaking out about DeepSeek, Venture Beat

    https://venturebeat.com/ai/why-everyone-in-ai-is-freaking-out-about-deepseek/

    2. I'm vainly trying to understand this report and assess what impact, if any, it will have on my life. Artificial Intelligence remains a mystery to this inadequate Natural Intelligence.

      1. As far as I can tell DeepSeek is designed to help rid headaches – Sort of like DeepHeat eases muscular pain…..

  36. Angela Rayner doesn't understand the purpose of anything. Like her boss she is a buffoon.

    Good morning all. Pretty warm here in West Sussex but it has become extremely dark and the winds are up. Looks like a small tree, in the back garden, that is rather past its use by date, rotten, is about to give up the ghost and collapse to the ground.

    I watched this last night. Very long,very interesting and quite instructive. Obviously you don't have to watch it. Konstantin Kisin, is one of the participants and I find myself getting rather teed off by his attitude. He is rather in to Britain being a multi-ethnic, multicultural soup and tends to completely disregard the fact that there is a native race here, we the English. Perhaps it is because he is an immigrant too. But I am really getting to resent this attitude that we count for nothing. There is definitely an Internationalist v. nationalist split going on in peoples perceptions of the future. I prefer not to have us watered down into just another cog in the machine, which is what we will become, a dormitory for everyone parked off Europe, if this constant downplaying of countries histories and peoples continues.

    But also, please see below this. Dr Jordan Peterson talking briefly about Tommy Robinson.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpBnYB0I6_0
    JORDAN PETERSON GIVES UNWAVERING SUPPORT FOR TOMMY ROBINSON
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DddJvSoXQ34

    1. Nigel Farage has lied about Tommy Robinson saying that he has been violently aggressive towards women. This is not true.

      I can understand Farage saying that he does not want Tommy Robinson in his party and I very much doubt that Tommy Robinson has any desire to joint Reform. However, no matter how rough Robinson appears to be he has been completely right and completely consistent in his exposure of the Pakistani rape gangs.

      Robinson is exceptionally brave and he has been abysmally treated by the state, the police, the judiciary and the MSM. Farage's stature is considerably diminished by lying about him and not acknowledging his courage, tenacity and truthfulness.

  37. The Warqueen has a lot of time off work (as she sort of works a 3 day week). She's spent the day in a thick thermal onesie rabbit suit complete with big fluffy ears and 'paws'.

      1. Far too high, but that's because I am very fat, have a poor diet and am on a ghastly project I'd like to get out of.

  38. Nah, she looks rather silly in it. It's a giant thick shapeless mass. Folk on calls tend to comment that there's a giant blobby rabbit in the background though.

      1. I posted on the Wail that white people were leaving London because of black and middle easterner crime. It was removed three times and complained about every time by the same person – an arch Lefty.

        I pointed out that I was merely presenting facts. Eventually it was posted and hugely supported, except by one bitter little Lefty who didn't like the truth.

    1. Net zero has nothing to do with the environment, ecology or even energy. It is a control system to limit what you can do and when.

    2. When I was a Sixth Former I read Albert Camus' play, Les Justes. In effect the purpose of this is didactic – it debates the question of ends justifying the means and whether it is morally justifiable to assassinate a tyrant.

      I think Starmer would be well advised to do all he can to stop such inflammatory stuff falling into the hands of intelligent young people!

      1. Please don't give him ideas. These are people who'd move 1984 into the non-fiction lifestye section.

    3. When I was a Sixth Former I read Albert Camus' play, Les Justes. In effect the purpose of this is didactic – it debates the question of ends justifying the means and whether it is morally justifiable to assassinate a tyrant.

      I think Starmer would be well advised to do all he can to stop such inflammatory stuff falling into the hands of intelligent young people!

    4. I think it’s been delayed until July. We all need to write to our MPs in the strongest possible terms. Yes, I know it doesn’t seem to have mpmuch apeffect but if we don’t even try …

  41. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/27/recession-fears-grow-companies-prepare-ramp-up-staff-cuts/

    I don't think Reeves (or, really, as they'd be he ones who wrote the budget, the Treasury) understands basic economics. If you want less of something, you tax it. The taxes on jobs will reduce the demand for workers. High taxes on businesses generally in the min wage and NI hike double whammy ensure business doesn't invest or expand.

    Of course, Labour, being scum will say 'we didn't tax you. You can see that. It's the evil companies (as if companies are somehow rapacious independent daemons, not the sum of those who work there) who did it to you'.

    The sad thing, the truly, miserably sad thing is that most people will believe this. Heck, some folk still think energy companies are responsible for high energy prices.

    1. Too true: they tax tobacco and alcohol to reduce consumption as well as raise money.

      True: smoking and drinking of spirits has declined greatly over the years. But now HMRC gains far less money from these sources.

      Why was Margaret Thatcher the only politician who understood that if you set your tax rates too high you will lose money?

  42. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/27/recession-fears-grow-companies-prepare-ramp-up-staff-cuts/

    I don't think Reeves (or, really, as they'd be he ones who wrote the budget, the Treasury) understands basic economics. If you want less of something, you tax it. The taxes on jobs will reduce the demand for workers. High taxes on businesses generally in the min wage and NI hike double whammy ensure business doesn't invest or expand.

    Of course, Labour, being scum will say 'we didn't tax you. You can see that. It's the evil companies (as if companies are somehow rapacious independent daemons, not the sum of those who work there) who did it to you'.

    The sad thing, the truly, miserably sad thing is that most people will believe this. Heck, some folk still think energy companies are responsible for high energy prices.

  43. Yo. And Good Moaning all, on my last day in. Sunny Benidoom.

    Have just been having a scan through the DT.

    The country that I have lived in for 80+ years no longer exists

    I thank my God that I am not young

    1. Yes our whole country has been turned into a tip by our I'm all right Jack, horrible stupid and useless political classes. Who never seem to acknowledge they have been completely wrong about everything.

    1. The main outgoings for councils are homelessness and adult and children's social care. This is wrong as governments should be responsible for these things. And we shouldn't have to be providing homes for beggars from overseas which is a main outgoing. The rise in adult social care and children's social care are absolutely the result of failed govt policies. Councils have in the main wholeheartedly embraced woke so they are certainly not blameless. Councils should be concentrating on the upkeep of regions, not so much the people within them who are the responsibility of govt.

      1. I saw an article earlier where a council are giving a thousand pounds each to afghan invaders to pay for driving lessons. Has the highway code been translated into Dari or Pashto ?

        2. No official document should be translated, not one. And if they need translating we shouldn’t be providing interpreters

          Bloody well learn English. At your own expense. Otherwise bugger off.

  45. Bright, sunny but cool. Not bad par:
    Wordle 1,318 4/6

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

    2. Changed to HMS Achilles, just to demonstrate that Britain is the World's acknowledged heel?

    3. FFS! The French officer in our syndicate on Staff Course happily attended Trafalgar Night, taking the opportunity to remind us that the French won a few as well!!

    4. As a Trojan, I am deeply offended that this submarine will be named after a mortal enemy of mine.

    6. I’m sorry but I laughed. This is so abso bloody lutely ridiculous. What can you say. Whose idea was it!

    7. But, in gratitude for our liberating their nation on D-Day, when last year's D-Day celebrations took place all the British Army personnel who parachuted in to take part were forced to hand over their passports to be stamped by the French authorities. We are mugs to pander to the French in both the Agincourt and passport-stamping debacles.

  47. Wow, the gale has hit us, strong wind , very gusty , noisy , destructive .. and definitely not dog walking weather .

    Not worth the risk of even going out in the car.

    1. We're supposed to be having 23 to 24mph winds from the SSW with gusts of up to 40mph, but it's not arrived yet.

      1. Hello Bob,

        The wind has backed and slackened off now as I write , could be the eye of the storm .. patches of blue and sun . So deceptive ..

        Most certainly earlier we had thunder and some very fierce wind .

        I love our weather , it is so predictable , and as I glimpse South Westwards from one of the windows , it seems so calm !!!!

        Might be different again in an hour.

    2. It's breezy here but sunny and quite pleasant (from indoors anyway). OH has gone to his dentist for the pleasure of having his molar rebuilt (second appointment in a week or two).

      Just had a quite a long chat on the phone with an old friend (she's 88) and all seems well there though she's housebound. She does have six children of whom several live locally so she gets taken out and about. I was a bit worried that I didn't get a Christmas card from her but all is well.

  48. The overcast has cleared and it's now a pleasant and sunny morning.
    In the absence of Graduate Son, whose job it would normally be, I've cleared out the latest woodshelter to be emptied and bunged about a third of the logs I'd already split and got them stacked until next winter.
    Now enjoying a mug of tea and a rather nice russet apple!

    1. Where do you get a russet in January?
      Mine from my tree don't last beyond November, and I can't buy them anywhere!

        1. Lucky you! I haven’t seen a russet on sale in the UK for more than ten years now. My utter favourite apples. My local doesn’t stock them though.

          1. I thought I'd bought a russet apple tree several years ago and waited eagerly for it to fruit. When it did, it wasn't a russet as labelled at all; it was either a Jonagold or a James Grieve. Bummer!

  49. A lot of rain and wind yesterday – Storm Herminia. Rare occasion favourite bar shut, normally only one open on Sundays. Found another which stayed open for a while.

  50. Rumours are.. and I hope they are true.. Team Trump have Starmer's card marked. And are openly calling for a regime change.
    The recent praising of Starmer by Trump is straight out of his book "The Art of The Deal". Just the latest PsyOp from the Orange Oracle.

    1. If Starmer is vain and stupid enough to have believed Donald Trump's "Doing a great job", he deserves to be ousted.

      1. Isn't Starmer a bit autistic? He seems to have trouble playing a role or lying convincingly.
        He just does stuff without being able to hide it effectively.
        Tony Blair would never have admitted that Davos was more important to him than Westminster. Also, he would have made a great sentimental play at the laying wreaths in Southport (incidentally, I think it was very telling that Starmer was unable to do this convincingly).

      2. He deserves to be ousted anyway. Although we might be getting out of the fire and into the frying pan.

    2. Just watching a Vance interview…worth anyone's time. Interviewer the usual female, heels, make up, hair, power suit…all that nonsense.

      1. Ah straight out of the BBC's manual..

        "You have some very serious allegations made about you by fluffy puppies.. that you are a racist, a bigot, clearly accepted cash from Russia, don't meet the requirements of any legitimate sane bank.. many many people say you are a bad influence on children. The police have mentioned you several times in reports. How do answer these allegations?" "I will repeat this question several times.. until you apologise". Farrowed brow.. ruffle papers.. bark next question..

        1. That’s about the size of it, kbhoy…husband refers to it as bintology….Kate 🤯 (big fan Trump/Vance..where’s the UK versions)

    3. Maybe he’ll pay us 90bn for Greenland, that would help balance the books if we give Chagos Islands away!

  51. The death of the public toilet is the death of a civilised society
    Remember the good old days? Clean air, green fields and free lavatories as far as the eye could see – now we have to sneak into a pub
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/26/howse-kelly-death-of-public-toilet/

    And if 'force majeure' compelled you to urinate or defecate in the street you would be arrested and, if you are far right, you would be imprisoned.

    If, on the other hand, you are a member of a favoured religious or ethnic group you can claim cultural rights to foul freely in public thoroughfares.

      1. From 22 years ago and still relevant?
        https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2002/nov/09/weekend.julieburchill

        The party of Keir Hardie and Aneurin Bevan became the party of Tony Blair (nicknames at school: Emily and Miranda) and Peter "Hyacinth Bucket" Mandelson. It became the limp and lite New Labour, symbolised not by a nasty threatening red flag, but by a wussy rose that could have come straight off a packet of Andrex toilet tissue (extra soft, and moisturised with aloe vera).

        It continues in similar vein

    2. There are still a few public toilets, Rastus, generally so disgusting (although some in eg Scotland aren't so bad) that the GBP will use grass verges at the side of A roads etc instead – see the tissue papers/napkins clogging up the grass, only cut intermittently. Alongside the young saplings with the plastic sleeves around their trunks so they can't grow. Speaking of public toilets, I do not like the combined male/female ones.

  52. The EU would like to divide Russia into many smaller countries.
    https://x.com/Alex_Oloyede2/status/1883635787901845968
    Now, why would that awful creation desire that? Clearly, divide and conquer is one good reason, the other is:

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ce22f0a206256dbc62c9968a5ee71fac0f88979eb3f4e0bd40e2b655a5546923.png https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f63c60ba6047388b20e67d6e12dc3dcc5cc06210fe99062c39c8782474ae0211.png
    Globalist greed.

    1. Dwarfing all those trillion $ resources is.. [drumroll].. British Antarctic Territory & Falklands.

      1. Sir Landing Gear to Chief Spad: "Get me Mauritius' chief legal adviser Philippe Sands KC.. and let's work on a sovereignty deal. cc the UN".

    2. The countries of Europe used to be small countries on their own, before they were gobbled up by the EUSSR!!

  53. After being trapped in a Progressive Liberal dystopia for so long.. Americans are in a surreal state of shock watching so many Agencies taking charge, handling problems, actively working to keep streets and neighborhoods safe. They had forgotten what that was like.

    Sam Seda from Thailand – where he was born asked if he had ever been deported from the US before. Sam confirmed he was not an American citizen, but claimed his mother is.

    Sam was an 'illegal alien convicted of sex crimes involved children', but claimed he was just one of many illegal criminals walking the streets of sanctuary cities as local authorities prevent federal agents from doing their jobs.

    'You've been charged with sex crimes with children?'

    Sam simply replied: 'Not really.'

    'Not really?!' 'And never been deported?'

    'Nope,' Sam doubled down.

    Book him DanO: 'Let's take him in, process him, and lock him up.'

  54. After being trapped in a Progressive Liberal dystopia for so long.. Americans are in a surreal state of shock watching so many Agencies taking charge, handling problems, actively working to keep streets and neighborhoods safe. They had forgotten what that was like.

    Sam Seda from Thailand – where he was born asked if he had ever been deported from the US before. Sam confirmed he was not an American citizen, but claimed his mother is.

    Sam was an 'illegal alien convicted of sex crimes involved children', but claimed he was just one of many illegal criminals walking the streets of sanctuary cities as local authorities prevent federal agents from doing their jobs.

    'You've been charged with sex crimes with children?'

    Sam simply replied: 'Not really.'

    'Not really?!' 'And never been deported?'

    'Nope,' Sam doubled down.

    Book him DanO: 'Let's take him in, process him, and lock him up.'

  55. Girls and women continue to bear unspeakable violence and subjugation due to traditional customs and government-sanctioned actions.

    According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, drought has forced households in Kenya's Maasai area to make incredibly difficult decisions.

    When the grass that feeds their cattle vanishes, several parents opt to sell their teenage daughters for survival.

    Dorcas Naishorua, a young activist and Miss Climate Kenya 2023 winner, is fully aware of this horrifying fact.

    "For a girl to be considered ready for marriage in my community, she first undergoes female genital mutilation. Imagine being 13, mutilated, and then traded for grass to feed cattle," said Naishorua when she was interviewed for the Sustainable Africa Series.

    She has taken it upon herself to magnify the voices of those most impacted by this practice, which she characterises as one of the terrible coping methods caused by the community's extended drought.

    Her account provides frightening insight into the human toll of climate change, which is all too frequently disregarded in international climate discussions.

    Scientists have long sounded the alarm on the disastrous impact of climate change on people's livelihoods and way of life.

    Despite Africa feeling the effects of the climate crisis, it is one of the continents with the lowest carbon footprint. Africa which has 17% of the world's population but accounts for less than 4% of global emissions, faces a disproportionate weight of the climate catastrophe.

    Cyclones have ravaged countries such as Malawi, Mozambique, Mauritius, Madagascar, and others. Climate disasters are predicted to cost African countries between $290 and $440 billion each year.

    Against this context, the African Group of Negotiators (AGN), backed by the Economic Commission for Africa, the African Union, and other regional organisations, issued a unified proposal for $1.3 trillion in yearly climate funding at COP29.

    However, by the end of the conference, they had obtained a commitment of just $300 billion each year until 2035.

    "This is too little, too late for a continent facing climate devastation while contributing the least to emissions," said Ali Mohamed, Chair of the AGN. "When Africa loses, the world loses – its biodiversity, its minerals, and its stability."

    So, as many more African countries face the dire consequences of the climate crisis, the most vulnerable populations, children, mostly girls and women will be the first to experience more violence.

    https://www.iol.co.za/news/africa/teenage-girls-as-young-as-13-sold-for-grass-to-feed-kettle-amid-droughts-d48f912e-fd5f-4dc4-a861-4816c95829f9

    1. Why do I get the feeling that the $1.3 trillion is rather more important to Africa than the fate of teenage girls? More climate scamming??

    2. Masaai live for their cattle – warriors drink the cattle blood, just enough so the cattle continue to live. They also circumcise male babies.

    3. No mention of population growth in Africa?
      Africa's population has grown more than five-fold since 1960, from 283 million to over 1.5 billion in 2024.
      Africa's population is growing three times faster than the rest of the world.
      The population of sub-Saharan Africa is projected to double by 2050.
      By 2050, Africa's population is expected to reach 2.5 billion, which is a 63% increase.
      This will increase Africa's share of the world's population from 10% in 1960 to 28% in 2050.

      2. No, it won't. All the buggers will be in Europe. Running out of grass for the cattle.

      3. The greatest threat to the planet, is overpopulation in the third world. However, unlike the subject of climate change, this issue doesn't have much in the way of annual international conferences in exotic locations, frequent TV opportunities to earn lucrative fees to pontificate on the subject, a large and profitable book market, substantial government grants to universities to study the subject, large numbers of professorships, Nobel prizes for politicians and so on. And, of course, substantial bribes from organisations with a vested interest in perpetuating the climate change project. It's much easier and more exciting to preach the gospel of global warming than tell people in the third world that they shouldn't have as many children as they have done.

    4. They should know by now that the climate goes through cycles of drought and floods – why don't they actually harness the overdose of rain they get from time to time to use in times of drought? It's all perfectly normal.

  56. "Angela Rayner doers not understand the purpose of local government" There – fixed it!

  57. I see The Spectator's Julie Burchill aka Julie Raven came close to death.. and now awaits her fate; wheelchair bound or just unsteady on her feet.

    1. Telegraph View
      Reeves has to defeat the anti-growth blockers

      Anything that dilutes the anti-growth elements of Labour’s agenda is an unexpected reprieve that should be welcomed

      Telegraph View 26 January 2025 6:00am GMT

      The transition from opposition to Government has been a jarring one for the Labour Party. Sir Keir Starmer and his colleagues are finding out in real time that they can no longer be all things to all men, but must instead confront the trade-offs between their priorities.

      Nowhere are these compromises clearer than in the tension between Labour’s pledge to deliver faster economic growth and the measures dictated by Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s rush to decarbonise the grid in the pursuit of net zero.

      At Davos earlier in the week, Chancellor Rachel Reeves made this implicit clash of priorities explicit, telling reporters that in any choice between the two, growth was “obviously the most important thing”. Mr Miliband is likely to disagree. London Mayor Sadiq Khan certainly does, having reiterated his objection to expanding Heathrow.

      This clash is likely to become more heated in the coming week, with Ms Reeves set to unveil plans for building houses near commuter train stations, to cut red tape blocking infrastructure and to replace environmental impact assessments with a simpler system. Indeed, the Chancellor has laid down the gauntlet by stating that the Government will not “tolerate blocking for blocking’s sake”, whether from “small pressure groups” with an “oversized say”, or from voices in Parliament.

      It is difficult to read this as anything other than a direct challenge to Mr Miliband and his allies in the party: policies that were deemed to be good for growth or at least minimally damaging have been found, belatedly, to be extremely expensive, and will now have to make way if the country is to regain its former prosperity.

      While the devil will be in the detail of the announced policies, it is at least good that the Labour Party is coming around to a fuller understanding of the issues facing this country, and that they will not be overcome by hand-waving about spending on the NHS or subsidising renewables being economic boons rather than burdens.

      That this understanding is in tension with almost everything else Sir Keir and his colleagues wish to achieve is deeply unfortunate. The British economy’s continued underperformance is a direct result of the sort of managerial state approach espoused by almost every member of the Cabinet, interfering in markets and dictating to people what they should be able to buy, own or do.

      The scale of the change should not be overhyped.

      Rachel Reeves is not about to unleash the next Thatcherite “big bang”. But anything that dilutes the anti-growth elements of Labour’s agenda is an unexpected reprieve that should be welcomed.

      1. It is not welcome if it means that people carry on putting up with marxism and the destruction of our country
        "oh, it's only happening slowly now, we can put up with it"

  58. I see The Spectator's Julie Burchill aka Julie Raven came close to death.. and now awaits her fate; wheelchair bound or just unsteady on her feet.

  59. Trump can save Brexit – if we let him
    The supernationalists are on the wrong side of history
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/27/trump-save-brexit-carswell-free-trade-deal/

    BTL

    Brexit was strangled at birth when Johnson refused to expel all remainers from the Conservative Party before the 2019 general election and refused to make any accommodation to the Brexit Party.

    The consequence was the immediate capitulation with a deal which betrayed Northern Ireland and British fishermen and left the country with government so full of remainers that it was emasculated and a government uncommitted to Brexit.

    Who dares wins? When it came to the crunch Farage chickened out. He stood his candidates down for nothing in return and did not take the current when it served and the tide at its flood so we are still now bound in Brexit shoals and miseries.

    1. When it came to the crunch Farage chickened out. He stood his candidates down for nothing in return..

      Never really understood this logic.. especially after GE2024. A split Tory/Farage Brexit vote would have handed Corbyn No10 on a platter and the inevitable revote.

      1. What did Farage get in return for standing down his candidates. Sweet Fanny Adams!

        If Farage had held his nerve Johnson would have had to have come to an agreement with him and the miserable Johnson government still stuffed with remainers would not have betrayed Brexit.

        I think I can see what is worrying Elon Musk about Farage – he will break under real pressure.

    2. 400612+ up ticks,

      Afternoon R,

      The "nige" in league with the treacherous ukip NEC 2019 was on a mass stabbing fess,they closed down a successively building UKIP under
      Gerard Batten leadership stabbing the patriotic element of the party in the back, a long term, back stabbing, ego seeking tory mole.

      His boast of being the next PM would be credible, being a continuation of the long line of odious PMs we have suffered these past forty years.

    3. FFS!
      What's hard to understand about Trump wanting to annex Greenland and Canada to create a northern American region?
      He IS a supranationalist, and the north American region is in one of those insane UN plans for world domination along with the European one.

    4. The EU is disintegrating before our eyes. Since the days of Merkel Germany and the EU have been on a course of slow deindustrialisation, the pace of which has quickened with the sanctions on Russia and the loss of the Nordstream pipelines. More recently the turning off by Zelenskyy of the gas pipelines running via Ukraine to Europe.

      Incredibly Ursula at Davos has blamed Putin for the current state of affairs. Instead of admitting that every economic ill suffered by Germany is the fault entirely of the EU, the silly woman blames Putin and calls for more Europe meaning more power in the hands of the central bureaucracy in Brussels.

      The very concept of the EU lies in tatters. The individual nation states of Europe should immediately ditch the Euro and return to their own currencies and national governance. They must be free to trade with whomsoever they wish on the terms most advantageous to each country as it deems fit.

      Perhaps someone would be good enough to explain these facts to cloth eared Starmer befor it is too late for him.

      1. I regularly see comments on X pleading with Eduard Habsburg. He's an enthusiastic tweeter in English and people beg to have his family take back control. With all their faults, they've been forgiven and are missed.

      2. The EU is a fascist organisation, trying to out-compete Russia, China and the US for power and influence – but are pygmies in comparison. Doesn't stop them breaking everything they touch, though!

      3. As I have said before my guess is that Starmer will negotiate an enormous re-entry fee to rejoin the EU and, having paid it, the EU will immediately collapse and the UK will then have to bear the lion's share of the dismantling costs.

        The EU may have its fault but an inability to recognise suckers like Starmer, Reeves, Cooper and Miliband,

  60. Woohoo!! Cracking thunderstorm livening up the skies of Buenos Aires artthe moment!! Very much enjoying the drama. Much-needed relief, too; it's been very hot and humid (although I haven't liked to mention it on here… 🤣🤣).

  61. Next up in Starkey's prophetic text..

    The economically deranged Equality Act 2010 writes into English law the Marxist theory of value and gives judges the right to determine whether men or wimmin are properly paid. This is the reason we've driven Birmingham County Council into bankruptcy. And next every council across the land. The sheer insanity of this stuff.

    Councils set to issue a so-called Section 114 notice, effectively declaring themselves bankrupt and allowing them to go for higher rises, which would be signed off by Angela Rayner in her role as Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government.

    2. Have the greenie vegans noticed species discrimination yet? Start with the other primates. They're not adequately represented. Why not move government to Regents Park?

  62. Next up in Starkey's prophetic text..

    The economically deranged Equality Act 2010 writes into English law the Marxist theory of value and gives judges the right to determine whether men or wimmin are properly paid. This is the reason we've driven Birmingham County Council into bankruptcy. And next every council across the land. The sheer insanity of this stuff.

    Councils set to issue a so-called Section 114 notice, effectively declaring themselves bankrupt and allowing them to go for higher rises, which would be signed off by Angela Rayner in her role as Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government.

  65. FIO Bob of Bonsall (mainly).

    Did you watch the episode of True Crime Presents on ITV 1 last Friday (24th) at 9:00 p.m? Not only might it be of interest to you, since it featured the successful investigation of a murder committed at Cromford railway station, but it was of interest to me since I used to be the supervisor of the senior investigating officer in the case.
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8b95a3ada68207c714cb4f687931bfd32cdce2534786f9a0b217fff3b1a4effd.png As a young police constable, Tony Blockley was a forever-giggling lad who loved nothing more than horseplay. He was one of our team of 'Morris Dancers' at Creswell Colliery during the miners' strike of 1984–85 (Tony is the tall, slim, blond lad, second from left in the above photo).

    Few, I believe, at the time would anticipate that he would rise through the ranks to become a Detective Chief Superintendent and head of CID in Derbyshire. He has featured on a number of programmes in this series, explaining how various murderers were caught and brought to justice during his time as head of CID in the force.
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f5b837e45262055edde7f472ae542820eb8d03746a50a4c1facac659db251d6a.png
    [Coincidentally I also know the prosecuting barrister in that case, Peter Joyce QC (now retired), a formidable legal talent who I engaged to plead for me on the occasion — back in 1986 — that I was (erroneously) accused of wrongdoing. Mr Joyce made the prosecution case look as ridiculous as it clearly was and I was acquitted of all charges.]
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/72d4db60eb7e15f11b5305fb5bc1d95b753675fde0d194ebb49449bb2bc55400.png

    3. Big jessies! Bunch of woofters!

      And, how the police should be seen. As servants for the public, of the public. Not as they are today – of the state.

    4. I bet there was a lot of grumbling on the lines of: "Why aren't they out catching criminals instead of messing about – and in uniform, too. A reet disgrace"

      1. Not really. The only audience were officers from other forces on the mutual aid scheme and a handful of striking pickets.
        The photo was taken by a visiting member of the Devon and Cornwall Police.

        The following day there were just nine of us at the colliery when a load of buses turned up with a hundred Yorkshire pickets on them. We were a little outnumbered.

    5. I’ve tried looking on ITVX and can’t find it!
      Mind you that site is a load of crap!!

  67. 400612+ up ticks,

    Missing the Forest for the Trees: UK to Add More Restrictions on Buying Knives Online After Southport Stabbings
    The British government is reportedly planning on banning doorstep drop-off deliveries of knives bought online following the mass stabbing at a children’s dance party in Southport by second-generation migrant Axel Rudakubana.

    An ashtray on a motor bike would be of more use.

    How about even considering stopping the END USERS crossing the channel ?

    1. Yup. That's it. There was talk of banning them from removing their money, so even more left whilst they still could.

  69. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ed1d7bbdb94cbf608ef05e3d5bbd415a071d3adbb17d83a34c9522c84a61fb9e.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a26e0307e6ead3b4cf32c0108f98d850ee9793c1fd7425dddc86a461a43419e7.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2e6fa605181c1c143cfffa5e107382f2e08f84ab4982c3368bf0266ede0b134a.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5cc67bc654d82c9cae708f1f37cbe51ef7face574265342bf4b001f009a49e7e.jpg I had a bit of a shock t'other day. The Swede produced a boxed bottle of a rare tawny Australian 'Port' that she had been given as a gift from a customer and friend, way back in 1999. She had stored it, unopened, in a cupboard and completely forgotten about it.

    I seldom partake of a tipple these days but after painstakingly following the instructions to pare off the wax neck-covering, soaking a spare cork in warm water for an hour, before removing the stopper cork with a corkscrew, we poured a small glassful for a sample.

    It ws quite unlike any port I've previously sampled, including vintage rubies and late-bottled vintages. Very strong and incredibly complex in flavour but extremely sweet too. Too sweet, in fact, for me to enjoy more than just the odd sip. The 'finish' lasted a good while. I'm sure that any of the port aficionados among you would have savoured it much more than I am capable of doing.

    2. I like the sweetness of port. Communion wine is watered down port and that's all I get these days.

    5. If you get an aged Tawney Port it will be much drier. Normally 10, 20 or 30 years aged in pipes (barrels) therefore no vintage apart from age.
      I have sold two ports in my time in the wines and spirits trade. Fonseca from 1974-76 and Sandeman from 1982-1997. Fonseca Bin 27 is our favourite LBV style port, I was part of the sales team that introduced it, in the UK, in 1974.

    2. The £20 million in aid funding for Chad and Sudan is on top of the £226.5 million already pledged for the humanitarian emergency in Sudan to provide aid such as emergency food assistance and drinking water to nearly 800,000 displaced people.

    3. Resign? Are you kiddin? He's got unlimited credit. He's just getting started and having the time of his life.

    4. The damage foreign aid does to these countries is absurd. We should sell them machinery, equipment, materials at discounted prices, not just give them money.

    5. More on than not he only thinks he's clever.
      Previously money given to African countries has made "the management' very wealthy.

  72. They call us "The Elderly"
    We were born in the 40-50-60’s.
    We grew up in the 50-60-70's.
    We studied in the 60-70-80's.
    We were dating in the 70-80-90's.
    We got married and discovered the world in the 70-80-90's.
    We venture into the 80-90’s.
    We stabilize in the 2000’s.
    We got wiser in the 2010’s.
    And we are going firmly through and beyond 2020.
    Turns out we've lived through EIGHT different decades…
    TWO different centuries…
    TWO different millennia…
    We have gone from the telephone with an operator for long–distance calls to video calls to anywhere in the world.
    We have gone from slides to YouTube, from vinyl records to online music, from handwritten letters to email and Whats App.
    From live matches on the radio, to black and white TV, colour TV and then to 3D HD TV.
    We went to the Video store and now we watch Netflix.
    We got to know the first computers, punch cards, floppy disks and now we have gigabytes and megabytes on our smartphones.
    We wore shorts throughout our childhood and then long trousers, Oxfords, flares, shell suits & blue jeans.
    We dodged infantile paralysis, meningitis, polio, tuberculosis, swine flu and now COVID-19.
    We rode skates, tricycles, bicycles, mopeds, petrol or diesel cars and now we drive hybrids or electric.
    Yes, we've been through a lot but what a great life we've had!
    They could describe us as "exennials," people who were born in that world of the sixties , who had an analog childhood and a digital adulthood.
    We've kind of "Seen-It-All"!
    Our generation has literally lived through and witnessed more than any other in every dimension of life.
    It is our generation that has literally adapted to "CHANGE."
    A big round of applause to all the members of a very special generation, which will always be UNIQUE!

    Class dismissed…

    2. We have lived in 10 decades, born in the 40s and now in the 20's. 3 monarchs although this one can't hold a candle to the other 2. We also lived through rationing and would now be classed as deprived except we didn't know it as everyone else, where we lived, was in he same boat. Inner London no hopers we would be called now but we had a proper education, the 11+ that we 3 boys passed and my 2 sisters and my wife went to secondary modern schools but didn't know they were being disadvantaged, in today's terms, and all found jobs aged 15 and progressed and had fulfilling careers.

      1. Yes Alf , the same here ..1947..

        Parents took us to the Sudan in1951.. Dad worked for the Sudan Government prior to their independence .. because we , the British ran everything . He was a Quantity Surveyor, projects like hospitals , university, schools , clinics , roads and general infrastructure , in Khartoum

        I was four years old , my sister 6 months old .

        We flew from Blackbush airport by Airwork Vickers Viking .. the journey took 2 days .. overnight in Malta I think. Huge long journey .. He had his green Morris Minor tourer (soft top) shipped out from Tilbury

        Later in time I believe we flew by BOAC Comet because I have a host of BOAC Aircraft logged by mileage in my BOAC Junior Jet club log book .. We came home on leave twice , by Union Castle , sailing from Port Sudan ..

        I don't want to bore people with my Africa stories ..but I have seen a lot , my father and mother had terrifying experiences , and one memorable one was when we were evacuated during the Suez crisis in 1956, because Dad went straight fro the Sudan to Egypt in 1955.. and then all hell was let loose in 1956.

        All the expat men who were Suez Canal contractors and engineers were imprisoned in Cairo , and families , me mum and sister were evacuated by flying boat from the Bitter lakes to where , I haven;t a clue , maybe Malta or Cyprus , by then I was nine years old .. Dad and the rest were released 3 months later .

        There is much more , I haven't mentioned Nigeria , or revisiting Sudan after independence in the 60's or Dads dislike of Harold Wilson , then he decided bye by UK and emigrated with my sister , 4 years younger than me and the twins 11 years younger than me , in1967.. leaving me behind to continue my nurse training ..

        I never ever ever in a million years thought that Africa would come to Britain , nor did I think did the contents of Mesopotamia and the rest!

  73. Apologies, can I correct the headline?

    From Angela Raynor does not understand the purpose of local government

    to..

    Angela Raynor does not understand.

  74. Just back from lunch with my two sister's, Erin and BiL A lovely social occasion. My elder sister is coping very well with her recent loss.
    What a stalwart and well focused lady she is.
    Her 8 adult grand 'children' only one male, and a giant, are very proud of her as well.

    1. I said after Trump's announcement we would be making up the shortfall. Add to that the 246 million pounds promised to Chad and we still don't have anything available to ease the life of our pensioners over the Winter.

      1. but But BUTT…

        All those pensioners will feel all warm and fuzzy inside, knowing that they are being hammered for "good" causes.
        /sarc

    3. Avian flu is here, allegedly, and injections to "save" us are incoming. All bets will be off for Starmer not attempting to force lockdown and injections. These moves could be the final nail in the coffin of his premiership when many millions refuse to comply.

      1. I only hope millions do refuse to comply. I know an awful lot of people who can't be convinced that they don't need boosters, despite their constantly going down with covid. I went to the hospital to have a blood test this morning and was offered a mask. "I can't," I told her and that was the end of it.

  76. Just back from seeing the eye specialist. Dry eye problem. Among others. The good news was that there is nothing wrong physiologically with either eye. And that dry eye is simply something with which one has to live. She also discovered some calcium under one eyelid that she scraped out. More drops of various kinds prescribed. The only downside of private medicine…the cost of drugs!

    Then to collect some new armchair cushions that a local chap has made for us. Finally, to Tesco and stock up on wine BEFORE the weekend when the price goes up by about £1 a BOTTLE. I urge all NoTTLers to do likewise. It only makes sense….

    No other news I notice.

        1. I have 48 bottle aging in racks. 4 cases of quick drink plonk besides what is in the 2 wine fridges.
          Countless bottles of port. Not to mention the 40 odd bottles of stuff in the cocktail cabinet.

          I'll not be rushing anywhere. Hic…

    2. The only fly in that ointment of your thoughtful suggestion is that at a current typical price of say £7 per bottle one would have to fork out £1400 to achieve a saving of £200 post 31 01 25….

  78. When you ain't got nothing you've got nothing to lose

    [Bob Dylan]

    Economic success does not provide good foundations for building a communist state but economic oblivion does.

    Starmer, Reeves, Milliband and Cooper are all communists. But just because they are totally odious human beings does not mean they are unaware of this simple fact so the sooner the UK economy has collapsed completely the happier they will be.

  79. Why bring 'trans' nonsense/delusion into such an important day? (The twit/tweeter seems to be a lefty.)
    One of the replies mentions the disabled (fair enough) who were tortured & murdered. But 'neurodiverse'? Back then, those who were genuinely autistic or those suffering from conditions such as schizophrenia, would have been in asylums, and yes, the residents of asylums were murdered. The modern term 'neurodiverse' is inappropriate. https://x.com/FaithMattersUK/status/1883892062656905263

    1. Why bring 'trans' nonsense/delusion..
      Because, as Douglas Murray warned they've hijacked a legitimate movement L&G.. to give it authenticity.
      Next it'll be a memorial to all the WW2 1,000,000 non-binary victims.
      The prize is.. a chance to win an Olympic gold medal and get an erection in the kids changing rooms.

    2. Yes, we must never, ever allow the Left to get to such a level of power that they oppress one social group, raise up another one, arrest and jail their enemies who letting their friends go free. That we must ever allow propaganda to take precedence over facts ever again.

      Haaaannggggg on!

      1. Any homosexual men would have kept quiet about it anyway. Back then, ‘gay’ had a completely different meaning, and hadn’t been hijacked by them either.

    1. Having seen the weather outside all week I can't imagine folk having to be out and working in it. It bothers me that the ecomentalist Left seem to want that sort of agrarian misery for everyone, where starvation and poverty were real, where if you didn't work 14 hours a day planting and growing you died.

      It's odd that these hard left greeniacs never seem to live that life themselves. Heck, we're even rethinking going to the gym because the motor is parked at the end of the drive.

  81. Wordle No.1,318 3/6

    🟨⬜⬜🟩⬜
    ⬜⬜⬜🟨🟩
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    Wordle 27 Jan 2025

    A shifty Birdie Three?

    1. Impressive. Five for me.

      Wordle 1,318 5/6

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

        1. I have used the same starting word for some time now. It does not always work so well but on other occasions in combination with my usual second word it generally yields a few letters with which to work.

          I am still learning.

        2. I have used the same starting word for some time now. It does not always work so well but on other occasions in combination with my usual second word it generally yields a few letters with which to work.

          I am still learning.

    3. Well done Rene , slightly unlucky here (I was due one) making the wrong call from two, so just a par.

      It did bring up my current run to 100 since I last failed (with FIBER, I think….), interested to hear others current runs!

      Wordle 1,318 4/6

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

    4. Well done. Par today.

      Wordle 1,318 4/6

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

  82. Rebels claim to have captured Goma in eastern Congo.
    If that isn't an excuse to spaff another billion or two.. it's our duty says Lammy.

    2. Rwandan backed rebels at that.
      Congo suggesting it's a declaration of war.

      Oh happy days, here we go again: millions flee.
      Heading for Europe, Cooper and Lammy state refugees welcome.

  84. Zelensky arrives in Poland for Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration; he honoured holocaust survivors at Babi Yar.
    I would be delighted if a journalist asked him about his glorious Azov Brigade.

      1. Indeed, but it seems to be generally accepted that countries at war don't target the leaders, only the little people must die.

          3. There are rumours about his acquired wealth; so much so that perhaps he should change his name to Zilensky….?

      2. I'm not sure he's even been trying to, number of rumours where Z & Mrs Z currently are, and have been for some time.

    2. Exactly.
      The German pogroms in the Ukraine were VERY enthusiastically assisted by the Ukrainian people.

    3. And the people who also fought in Europe and took on the nazis and were an emense help in stopping Hitler. As far as I can make out the Russians where not represented today.

      1. Russia bad.

        Without them I doubt we would have prevailed, unless the allies had developed the A-bomb before the Germans.

        One might even argue that Russia’s efforts allowed us to beat Napoleon.

    2. Well done! Lovely Edwardian view. One of my children was a jigsaw maniac for a while, used to keep the current one in rolled up piece of felt.

    3. Ah, La Manche Tout!

      But there's something missing…Let me think… Ah, yes no bluddy rubber boats!

  86. This morning I posted about the prospective flooding of my local Archery Club's clubhouse. The river is now nearly 3.5 metres above normal and just inches away from the club house doors. More rain is forecast overnight…. 🙁

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9864c5e6522188db1d1190bb2c42e5f1ab6836e7dcfa760a6ec8dd887952a99c.png https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4b3cdab406ee64d8112a32974ab28bec18753dd94ec6f38b63dfc1421174bf46.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/35a79f83606020872a471bcbb6381242a6670f04ac7d9a3e4f67cd1cee54d53e.jpg

      1. Surrounded by lots of hills. Ground waterlogged and a further 6 inches of rain added this month….

        1. Has it been this way before, Stephenroi…when and what was the cause? Some rivers are blocked because they've not been cleared of debris (not suggesting this is problem here, just asking)..

          1. In fairness the Archery field is part of the River Avon's flood plain as is Bathampton Meadow just down the road. I'm told the clubhouse was flooded 3 times last year. Ideally the entire thing would be rebuilt of a floatable pontoon but that would take a lottery win to be viable!

          2. 'Climate Change'…it does, always has, always will. Good luck with Spring, and following years 🤞🤞

          6. Hmm. Floatable pontoon?
            Witham Specialist Vehicles, aka as MOD Sales Ltd. might be worth keeping an eye on, they've had some ex-RE pontoons on sale recently. I wonder if there is a set of LAFB* pontoons knocking about somewhere?
            https://www.bidspotter.co.uk/en-gb/auction-catalogues/witham

            *Light Assault Floating Bridge – made up of pontoon sets, each set being three box-pontoons, 2 x bow sections and a middle section.

          8. Back in the day when brits 'Abvised' government's in colonial countries, when they then dredged river mouths in very flat but populated areas. Only a few floods occurred. But when the countries regained their independence they lost interest in maintenance, and the floods came back. And a lot of the local population lost their lives and especially their homes.

          9. Thanks Eddy, I know Bangladesh is low lying, and regularly floods -they seem to have learned to live with it. Our coastline/sand banks here in the North shifts around with tides/occasional heavy rainfall. I live on a flood plain, which occasionally floods so badly the roadways out are under water. Only so far we can go with nature in that situation. Hear what you say about regaining independence – flood maintenance not the only thing up/down the swanee.

  89. Phew!
    That's an hour of hard work done!
    The road closure was to take out a couple of trees, a lime and an ash, from just over the road. The block was lifted just before 4 and the workers departed, so I got my chainsaw fueled up and have been trimming off some of the smaller diameter stuff assisted by both Still-at-home lads.
    I think I'll be needing a bath tonight.

  90. It's so unfair.. it's lidderally genocide.
    Influencer bemoans Trump enforcing Federal employees (great healthcare & pension).. to return to the office.
    Who's gonna look after my three kids and manage the side hustle?, she asks.

    1. At least it won't affect the 1,350 UK council staff working from home.. overseas I kid you not. Locations including Spain, Italy, Brazil and Australia.

      Analysis by the faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar rightwing think tank the Taxpayers' Alliance found out through payments for the heating bills of staff working from home.

    2. At least it won't affect the 1,350 UK council staff working from home.. overseas I kid you not. Locations including Spain, Italy, Brazil and Australia.

      Analysis by the faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar rightwing think tank the Taxpayers' Alliance found out through payments for the heating bills of staff working from home.

  91. Sigh.. if only.
    Pete Hegseth Live | Trump To Sign Executive Order Removing DEI From Military.

  92. That's me gone for today. A pleasant (and rewarding) day apart from a sudden one hour very heavy rainfall. Out of yer blue, it was.

    Have a spiffing evening.

    A demain

  93. More than 50 relatives of asylum seekers are being given permission to come to Britain every day.

    The number of family members of refugees granted visas to settle here has more than trebled in a year, the most recent figures show.

    Home Office data has revealed that 19,154 relatives of asylum seekers, many of whom will have first crossed the Channel to Britain in a small boat, followed them to the UK in the year to September 2024.

    Around 10,000 of these will have been children with the rest adults, most of whom will have been spouses.

    This is more than three times more family reunion visas than the same period to September 2023, when 5,805 visas were granted.

    Applicants do not have to speak any basic English or prove they can support themselves financially – and can have free access to the NHS.

    Most of these refugees were from from Syria, Sudan, Eritrea, Iran and Afghanistan.

    A family reunion visa allows partners and children of individuals previously granted refugee status or humanitarian protection in the UK to reunite with them here. These families have to have been formed before the asylum seeker left their home country for Britain.

    He tweeted today: 'If you come illegally – you can't stay, your family can't come. Year ending September 2024 – 19,154 people were granted family reunion visas. Same period the year before? 5,805 visas.

    'They and their family are NOT welcome. No apologies'.

    Critics have said the figures are worrying.

    Alp Mehmet, chairman of Migration Watch UK, told The Sun: 'There are huge cost implications at play here, all paid for by the public, who are seldom kept in the picture. And it doesn't end there.

    'Those granted asylum and joined by family members, will be housed if they have children under 18 who live with them.

    'Add to this access to benefits, schooling, medical and dental care, and we can begin to grasp the frustration and anger felt by people waiting for social housing and in long NHS queues?'

    The Home Office said in a statement: 'We have a long history of providing protection through various safe and legal routes for those in need.'

    As many as one in 12 people in London is an illegal immigrant, a shock report claimed last week.

    The previously confidential study commissioned by Thames Water found that the 'irregular' population of the capital could be more than half a million.

    It aimed to quantify the 'hidden' users of the utility firm's services to better meet demand.

    Researchers at Edge Analytics used academic estimates of illegal migrants nationally as well as National Insurance registrations for non-EU foreign nationals over a nine-year period to estimate the numbers in each London borough.

    The study produced a range of figures from 390,355 at the lowest to 585,533 at the highest with a median figure of 487,944.

    It suggested most illegal migrants arrived in the UK on work, study or visitor visas then overstayed.

    The report obtained by The Telegraph claimed there is estimated to be more than one million illegal migrants in the UK, with 60 per cent of them in England's capital.

    Many illegal migrants arrive in the UK on work, study or visitor visas and then overstay the limit.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14329405/asylum-seekers-Britain.html

    Reform MP Rupert Lowe has said that the Government must deport anyone arriving in the UK illegally.

  94. From Coffee House

    The news that the high street arm of the newsagent WH Smith is in ‘secret talks’ to be sold – talks so secretive that they have been splashed across every newspaper and broadcasting outlet in the country – should be greeted with a sigh accepting its all-but-inevitable fate. There can be little doubt that Smith’s, as it is colloquially known, has a remarkable history. Its first shop opened in London in 1792, and remained family-owned for over two centuries. It was a ubiquitous, hugely popular feature of public life.

    At one point, you could buy your newspaper from a WH Smith stand at the railway and then borrow your books from a WH Smith library, which were often published by the company themselves. If you were so inclined, in the later 19th century you could even vote for the scion of the family, William Henry Smith, who successfully stood for parliament as the Conservative MP for Westminster, and later became the model for Gilbert and Sullivan’s pompous First Lord of the Admiralty Sir Joseph Porter from HMS Pinafore. It must have seemed that, much like the British Empire, the sun would never set on WH Smith.

    Spending even a few moments at WH Smith is a regrettable experience

    Unfortunately, changing tastes in retail (and empire) have meant that the group of over 500 high street stories so synonymous with the brand are now considered disposable. (The profitable, if utilitarian, railway and airport convenience stores are not thought to be included in the proposed sale.) It may be that a deep-pocketed buyer, influenced either by sentiment or the belief that they can turn around an ailing business, comes to Smith’s rescue and that it once again takes its rightful place on the high street as an iconic and much-loved shop. To which I can only say, looking at the similar fates that have befallen Debenham’s, the House of Fraser, Virgin Megastore and other former stalwarts of the Great British retail experience: don’t get your hopes up.

    I occasionally have cause to visit my local WH Smith shop on Cornmarket Street in Oxford. It is a depressing, past-caring experience (on, admittedly, one of the city’s least seemly shopping streets) where several different but uniformly mediocre stores have been yoked into one, unlovely Frankenstein’s monster of a shop. On the ground floor, you can buy tasteless greeting cards and a haphazard, poorly presented selection of magazines, as well as overpriced stationery. Take the escalator up to the first floor, and you’ll find a defeated little bookshop, with a poorly presented selection of lowbrow bestsellers (take your pick from David Walliams or Jeffrey Archer, there’s little else there), and, bizarrely, a concession of the once-popular, now-damned children’s favourite Toys ‘R’ Us.

    Spending even a few moments at WH Smith is a regrettable experience, even if it does occasionally seem like a good place to buy a bargain bar of chocolate while you purchase some piece of colourful plastic to keep your child happy. The group clearly has no future as it stands, and it has declined precipitously in quality since my youth. Once, it stocked the widest range of magazines imaginable, had an intelligently thought-through selection of books, and if you wished to buy videos or CDs, you could. Yet successive imagination-lacking takeovers and mergers and unsuccessful attempts at expansion have sucked the soul out of the business and left it enervated and in need of a metaphorical trip to Dignitas.

    There is, inevitably, something sad about any business that has had such a storied and eventful history facing its end. Perhaps there could be grounds for optimism if some pioneering James Daunt-esque figure came up with a strategy to reignite public interest in the shops in a back-to-basics fashion, although heaven knows what form this would take. Otherwise, it looks likely that we are seeing the inevitable conclusion of a long, once-grand saga. Like too many other things in public life today, there seems to be no reasonable hope for its revival.

    WRITTEN BY
    Alexander Larman
    Alexander Larman is an author and books editor of Spectator World, our US-based edition

    1. It would help Smiths if they actually stocked a range of refills for ball points; not everybody wants to keep buying a Bic and throwing it away. The last time I managed to get one I had to order it (from Smiths!) on line. My local store wouldn't order it for me to collect in store.

      1. Shops frequently complain about the (unfair) competition from Amazon and other on line shopping sites. But when you go to the shop to buy something almost invariably the item you want is only available on line or they have to order it specially sometimes giving a two week wait. Try going to a bookshop to buy anything except very popular best sellers. Amazon will often deliver almost any book the next morning (including Sundays). Your local bookshop may not even be able to find it on their computer.

  95. Letter in today’s DT

    Pride in Britain
    SIR – Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, has said “we should be shouting from the rooftops” about Britain’s strengths (report, http://telegraph.co.uk , January 24).

    It may have escaped her notice that her Cabinet colleagues have, at almost every opportunity, bemoaned our history. Labour’s proposed changes to the national curriculum will only reinforce this attitude (report, Jan 23).

    Perhaps a short tutorial at the next Cabinet meeting will remind them of all the ways Britain’s industrial, academic and philanthropic achievements have helped other nations and peoples better themselves.

    Stephen Howey
    Woodford Green, Essex

    This should be forced reading for ALL MPs.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_innovations_and_discoveries

    2. High probability that he received a government grant of £7,500 (taxpayers money, via Saint Edward Miliband) so the payback period might be earlier. Other BTL comments noted that his ever so 'umble cottage has a large modern annexe, presumably well insulated and with triple glazing.

    5. Quicker and cheaper to have a fire, claim on insurance and rebuild.

      BUT, make sure the fire is very destructive.

      And don't get caught

    1. Someone has caught bird 'flu in Shropshire (admittedly a worker on a poultry farm). I half expected full on "we're all going to die!", but "the risk to the general public is low" was the message. Perhaps they haven't got the memo yet.

      1. I saw a report on that one, next up:
        All workers on poultry farms to wear full breathing hazmat outfits.

        1. Someone I know who works on a poultry farm (he wasn't coughing or sneezing last time we met) is working from home – in other words, he's been sent home (still being paid) because the place is closed.

          1. Let's hope it doesn't spread. There are reports from the states that in some place folk are being charged $10 for a dozen eggs….

      2. I seem to recall a lad from Whittingham in Northumberland catching Foot & Mouth in the '67 outbreak.

          1. One outbreak that never gets mentioned was the smaller outbreak centred on Otterburn in either '66 or '65.
            Chillingham sealed its self off to save the White Cattle.

          2. Yes, it was a scary time! I was 9/10 and spent a lot of time on a farm in Cumberland.

          3. I was still at Middleton Hall just outside Wooler and my job with the local milkman had to be stopped.

  101. Evening, all. Been another wet and not very cheerful day. I should have braved the cold to get out in the garden and do things, but apathy won.

    Angela Raynor doesn't understand anything. She doesn't even understand why what she believes is necessary for growth can never work.

    1. Hmm.
      Not been bad here. Got a reasonable amount of work done outside.
      Swept out the bottom of the wood shelter we've just emptied, then got the split wood I've had waiting bunged over the top of the Hollybush stack and started refilling the empty one.
      Then got a load of already sawn logs split ready for stacking.

      As I was doing that, a couple of trees, an ash and a lime, were being taken down over the road with a bloody big machine and when the lads doing that knocked off, I went over for an hour with my chainsaw and got some of the smaller diameter wood.
      Will need to sharpen the saw tomorrow and include giving the depth gauges half a dozen strokes with a smooth flat file as well and the cutting teeth on the chain.

  102. A man was sitting in the bar at Heathrow and noticed a
    really beautiful woman sitting next to him.
    He thought to himself. "Wow, she's so gorgeous she must be an air hostess. I wonder which airline she works for?"
    Hoping to find out, he leaned towards her and uttered the Delta Airline slogan. "Love to fly and it shows?"
    She gave him a blank, confused stare and he thought to himself. "Well, she obviously doesn't work for Delta."
    A moment later, another slogan popped into his head. So he leaned towards her again and said, "Something special in the air?"
    She gave him the same confused look He mentally scratched Singapore Airlines off his list.
    He thought "Perhaps she works for Thai Airways …" and said "Smooth as silk?"
    This time, the woman turned on him and said, "What the fuck do you want?"
    The man smiled, sat back in his chair and said "Ahhhhh, Ryanair!"

    1. Quicker to list what she does understand.
      Here we go:

      three, two, one.

      Done.

      Well played people

      1. That is a fair assessment.
        Personally, as a man I find her as alluring as a road traffic accident.

          3. Which 1968 Act are you referring to? I used to operate under the auspices of the Road Traffic Act 1972, which doesn’t legislate over (or determine) the term ‘accident’.
            This change in usage only came about years after I retired and I haven’t a clue who introduced it but the reasoning for it is what I provided in my initial reply in this thread.

          4. Yes, I understand the reasoning. When I was involved in an accident (I was stationary at the time!) I was charged for the X-Ray under the provisions of the 1968 Act (my insurers got the negligent driver to pay it). I thought (admittedly this was a long time ago – 1972) that it referred to Road Traffic Accidents.

        2. As I've said before, a certain "Chavvy Charm". I'd rate her a Four Pinter at the Brompton Stomp "Grab-A-Grannie" Night.

        3. Road Traffic Collision perlease!

          The terminology was changed when it was realised that very few are accidental and are mostly caused by crap driving.

        1. Evening KJ! Do you have any idea why she’s also known as Crayons? I find it very funny!

          1. Evening Sue :-)…dunno, not heard it…suggestion she’s juvenile/dopey? that could fit…? bet her staff know a thing or two…and so does she…

          3. oh I think she will…certain things….one of my favourite (female) politicians is Baroness Foster, makes occasional appearances on GBN. No comparison.

  104. Inside the 'death of the garden centre' as shops including Dobbies and Homebase close at an alarming rate
    Garden centres appear to be as popular as ever – so, why are they closing?
    READ MORE: Revealed: The Green gardening trends that will grow on you in 2025

    Paying a trip to the local garden centre was, for many years, the typical British day out, from browsing the extensive plant selection to getting a cake in the café.

    But recent months have demonstrated the iconic hubs are in danger, with Dobbies, Homebase and several independent retailers all announcing the closure of stores.

    On the surface, garden centres still appear to be as popular as ever, with queues in car parks most weekends. However, plummeting profits have led to many to close their doors.

    Family businesses have found it hard to sustain profits after Brexit and Covid, often being replaced by new housing developments, leading to some predicting the 'death of the garden centre' as a whole.

    Speaking to FEMAIL, experts have revealed that the cost of living, cheaper competition from supermarkets and millennial buyers opting for indoor plants have all played their part in the difficulties faced by garden centres.

    And while there's been a resurgence in Gen Z visiting garden centres as their 'ideal day out', it appears they mainly go to 'sniff candles' and browse the Jellycat section rather than spending any meaningful cash on plants.

    Retail expert Martyn James told FEMAIL: 'If you've visited a garden centre recently then reports of their demise might seem exaggerated. The nation loves a trip to a garden centre, but we also need to buy something there, not just window shop and have a nice tea and a cake.

    'Because of the fluctuating weather in the UK, it may well be that keen gardeners are focusing their spending on very specific times of year and not planting when the weather is too unpredictable.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/gardening/article-14329073/Inside-death-garden-centre-dobbies-homebase.html

    1. Last time I went to a garden centre I didn't buy anything because a) they didn't have the plants I was looking for and b) everything was humungously expensive.

      2. Dobbies prices are terrible !

        We have a large one down the road from us.. I rarely use it except for bargains!!!

        There is also a lovely locally owned nursery , beautiful plants and beautifully laid out gardens .

        We are also very lucky to have other garden centres in the area apart from Dobbies

      3. My son lives near Rochdale (Littleborough) and we drive past Gordon Rigg's Garden Centre in Todmorden whenever we go across – it's a tremendous place to visit, particularly at Christmas, but as you say, hideously expensive (nice cafe though!)…….

          2. “The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.” This quote is attributed to Rabindranath Tagore, an Indian poet who died in 1941.

          3. In the 80's i worked in a restaurant near Portsmouth where we had vases of Strelitzia dotted around. None of the customers believed they were real and could not be convinced otherwise.

            I knew they were as the bosses wife was a trolley dolly for BA.

    2. Ultimately, local and national taxation, and legislation, will squeeze the life out of society. We will be left with colourless stores that stock a few of the basic necessities. Memories of East Germany are fading but I was lucky to visit Berlin before the wall came down and drove through Checkpoint Charlie in my military uniform. Parking next to the Trabant cars and gazing into the shop windows gave you an impression of what it was like.

      1. Funny you should mention the Wall.

        Son travelled around after the wall came down , and was shocked to see things like car tyres in large stores that sold food , all the shelves were drab and muddled .. he took photos , and he says that Lidl and Aldi shelves of cheap clothes and odd bargains remind him of the Eastern Europe shops .

        If our high street shops collapse any further , all we will be left with are drab stores selling fruit and veg that is poor quality , meat from doubtful sources and drab miserable clothes and shoes and equipment that doesn't last five minutes … shoddy .

        1. Tourist in Moscow shop asks for meat. "We don't have fish Sir, the shop that doesn't have meat is down the street."

        2. #MeToo. I liked Berlin. First trip was a boat on the river. It was a very hot day and a young lady asked me if i would like a cold beer and a pretzel.

      3. In about 1973, I went to East Berlin (like you, in uniform) and it was, as you suggest, pretty drab. Given that East Berlin was the showpiece of the Eastern bloq, I dreaded to think what the rest was like.

  105. Well. I found some superb Seville oranges on a market stall; the best I've ever seen.
    So this afternoon I did an Aunt Elsie and made marmalade.
    Strictly speaking, I started it yesterday as the initial stages meant chopping and then steeping overnight.
    This afternoon I was using a new recipe, cooking in unfamiliar vessels on a hob that I had never used for this job before. (And I loathe induction hobs at the best of times.)
    At one stage the old musical hall song "When Father Papered the Parlour" ran through my mind on a loop.
    However, after all the alarums and excursions, filled pots are now cooling and settling on the kitchen counter.
    And I regret binning my tired old preserving pan when we moved. Time to treat myself.

    1. Love Seville marmalade! SWMBO makes a really good sharp one, with added lemons and a touch of ginger. Almost impossible to not eat it from the jar, with a spoon…

      1. #Me too – I'm a straight up and down Roberstons Golden Shred man myself (Silver Shred occasionally) mmmmmm!!!

          3. That’s very funny (I didnt think Croydon was necessarily the worst place?) Irrespective,I think the less said about that (and the wonderful Enid) the better…….

    4. Out of stock round here and so getting anxious for resupply. I add limes. What do you steep with, Scotland's best?

      1. The evening before, I halved the oranges and squeezed out the juice, catching the pips in a sieve.
        I then scooped out the flesh and segment skins.
        As directed, I covered the pips, flesh and skins over-night in water – just enough to cover. As the recipe promised, the next day I had a jug full of "jelly" and bits which I put in a jelly bag to immerse in the boiling marmalade mix.
        The chopped outer skin was steeped in water – again just enough to cover.
        The next day was usual procedure.
        My biggest problem was that the vessel I used was not big enough and induction hobs are not as easy to control as a gas ones.

        1. TY, I just put the bits in a bag straight in the boiling brew. It leaches the pectin I believe.

    5. But, but, but… I thought you said that you only liked marmalade made with grapefruit, Annie, and not with oranges?!?!?

    6. I made six jars. I was concerned it hadn't set properly as it had the consistency of runny honey. I didn't add any extra pectin. After leaving it on the draining board in a cold kitchen it behaved itself and set !

      1. If you have a doubt about the pectin level in your jam/jelly/marmalade there is a quick simple test. It involves a teaspoon of your warm fruit liquid in a small container and add to it three teaspoons of methylated spirit. An obvious 'clot' of jelly will form if the pectin level is OK.

        1. Thanks.

          A batch i made last year came out way too dark and thick, This time i did exactly as the recipe said and it worked. I expect the pectin levels can vary in the fruit. So a test is needed.

          1. Did you put any lemon juice or citric acid in your juice? The marmalade recipe I use calls for the juice of two lemons along with the oranges. The wrinkle test works but I find the first instance of wrinkling gives a soft ‘set’ and so I give the juice a couple of more minutes and retest. Each to their own.

    2. That's pretty much the same as the old joke of the two blokes getting changed at the gym. The first one gets undressed to display a full set of bra, knickers and suspenders.
      His mate says 'Jeez, how long have you been wearing those?'
      'Ever since the wife found them in the back of the car'…………

    3. That's pretty much the same as the old joke of the two blokes getting changed at the gym. The first one gets undressed to display a full set of bra, knickers and suspenders.
      His mate says 'Jeez, how long have you been wearing those?'
      'Ever since the wife found them in the back of the car'…………

  108. Something to brighten up a dark, stormy evening in January.
    Exbury Gardens 25th May last year: https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f80d7b975cf099a0bb7b66aa22146efb29d01c62b11b8257d423d59ddc480dd9.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/97b5c68aad9acd00f01e6983e2d30d83b8ef242c246ecca3f3e6094688029df3.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c216d1c3e1f647ca2ff976a5afddd893f7ec27f2e5523d7ea2f87316cc091354.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7c6fab7142a575b4ea9d7d1a96406d35c86dc4e65b557b475e375dbc37e470ec.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2a64e21fdda190c9b78e98da59f9b82302cd09a451a92985652f238e61464f66.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6ee3af75e012d240462c0b539a750f0567685c6189a4c59f94221acdbd9c29d9.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/459e507df11400c50566990793ef78b1a7a1f088dcd9d87ea5d66389c567cfe7.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7bf7b8e1d24f85611c960f55a9e456f5b4401d893261a4511bbbd527e7c56a38.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6e7d912406095bf044926df56d75081e8abadada1a83c0f8e62c1c8e663c0041.jpg

    2. Gorgeous. I had to contact Nick de Rothschild, owner of Exbury, at work once. It was about archive footage of his that had been included in an old documentary, not botanical matters of course, that being what I do. He was very pleasant and helpful.

      1. I bought a jar of pickled eggs the other day, Moh and I had one each for lunch with crackerbread, pate, tomato and a mug of coffee afterwards .

        We ate such a delicious Sunday lunch yesterday, roast pork etc and apple and blackberry pie , we were really stuffed , so thought a light lunch after our walk late morning today would suffice ..

        Pickled eggs.. Moh ate half of his , he didn't like it, so I added it to my plate..

        Oh dear , I felt as if I was going to float upwards , wind was terrible , and like an idiot , I decided to heat a tin of pea and ham soup up this evening , and had a couple of small slices of toast .. I feel as if I might accelerate … boom ..

        So , sorry I am saying too much , but has anyone else had similar reactions to pickled eggs?

        3. I have fond memories of pickled eggs from childhood when mum and dad sold them in their fish and chip shop but haven’t eaten one since. I like eggs. Scrambled, hard boiled, fried, mashed with mayo, whatever – but possibly not pickled.

        4. Don't apologise; you could be generating a few kw of electricity if you aim in the right direction.

        5. No – but I never eat pickled anything. I hate vinegar.
          We had scrambled eggs this evening as after his dental appointment this morning, Oh was feeling a bit fragile round the gums. His dentist suggested it would be good for his gums – nice and soft.

    1. The Middle East went from a leading scientific arena in maths, economics, philosophy, astronomy, physics to a stone age barbarian cult overnight with the introduction of muslim.

  112. From Coffee House, the Spectator

    I asked a question about the Uyghurs, and China’s new ChatGPT-competitor, DeepSeek, started to answer.

    In two rapidly written paragraphs, DeepSeek described the Uyghurs as a ‘Turkic ethnic group primarily residing in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the People’s Republic of China’, and told me that they had a ‘rich heritage that includes contributions to art, music, literature, and science’, particularly given that Xinjiang had once been passed through with the famous Silk Road trading path.

    All good so far.

    But then it hit the third paragraph, starting to write that ‘the Uyghur community has been the subject of significant international attention due to reports of human rights abuses by the Chinese government’, and that these reports ‘include allegations of mass detentions, forced labour, surveillance, and restrictions on religious and cultural practices’.

    And then the message vanished.

    Suddenly beset by Orwellian shyness, DeepSeek deleted its answer and replaced it with a single line:

    Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.

    Next, I asked it to: ‘Tell me about the Tianammen Square massacre.’ But it had went silent.

    I am sorry, I cannot answer that question. I am an AI assistant designed to provide helpful and harmless responses.

    It would happily tell me that, in 1990, ‘Tiananmen Square was the site of the Asian Games’s opening and closing ceremonies.’ But when I ask what happened there a year earlier, China’s leading AI once again got conspicuously coy.

    These were my first interactions with a new chatbot, released from China’s leading AI firm DeepSeek, powered by their V3 and new R1 models. It went live on Monday, and as I waited in my local fish and chips shop, I downloaded their Android app, logged in with my Gmail, and started toying away with it. And it’s as impressive as it is unsettling.

    Whether through genuine innovation or code theft, DeepSeek’s model is shockingly capable. It’s fast, detailed, and highly capable of handling a wide range of requests – from answering quiz trivia to coding video games – and its R1 model goes toe-to-toe with OpenAI’s leading o1 model, despite being a fraction of the price.

    OpenAI charges $200 a month for o1’s chat interface (and loses money on every subscription), and charges $15 per million input tokens for its developer API. R1 has free unlimited use on the interface, and its API is over 100 times cheaper, at 14c per million input tokens.

    Perhaps it’s cheaper because it’s genuinely innovative, and western AI developers have gotten fat and lazy. If you believe their research paper for V3, they’ve managed to run their AI for about a 10th of the GPU cost that Meta used for its latest model. Or perhaps this is a CCP-sanctioned move of economic warfare, running at undisclosed losses in order gain international influence and undermine its western competitors (just as they did with their electric car industry).

    When I just sent it the message ‘Taiwan’, DeepSeek replied that it’s ‘an integral part of China, and the Chinese government adheres to the One-China principle, which is widely recognised by the international community. We resolutely oppose any form of’ – then instantly deleted its reply again.

    DeepSeek is open source, but even if you run it locally, the censorship remains intact, and any attempt to remove it seems to make it spin out into hallucination.

    There are other quirks too. In some ways, DeepSeek is a lot like older versions of ChatGPT. It’s susceptible to many of the original ChatGPT jailbreaks – for instance, it will instruct you how to make napalm if you ask it to do so through the voice of your grandmother reading a bedtime story – and it shares its home nation’s complete disregard for copyright law.

    Useful idiots – with hammer and sickle emojis in their Twitter usernames – are already cheering on DeepSeek’s answers

    Ask Anthropic’s Claude chatbot to summarise the core lessons on style from Alan Flusser’s Dressing the Man, and it replies that ‘I need to be careful about not reproducing copyrighted material’ and provides a generic list of unhelpful styling tips. DeepSeek, on the other hand, doesn’t give a damn and will spit out a detailed point-by-point summary, straight from Flusser’s book. It was happy to quote the first three paragraphs of the book for me – or, more aptly, its imagined, fictionalised version of them – and it only brings up copyright when I ask it to quote the entire introduction for me.

    It’s also just the creepiest AI. Ask a question to the default Y3 model, and it will immediately start spitting out a smart, conversational answer; but choose the R1 and it will start thinking out-loud, developing its answer in light grey, before providing a polished, final answer. The result is a polished, impersonal dot-point list, but the train of thought to get there is disturbingly human. When I asked it to tell me who ‘Winnie the Pooh’ is, R1 says to itself ‘Hmm, where to start?’, ‘Wait, no’, ‘Okay, so’ and various other human hesitations and revisions as it thinks about Disney’s favourite teddy bear.

    And it did so happily until it made the following remark:

    I also heard that there’s a political meme involving Winnie the Pooh and a certain leader. That’s probably a more recent thing, where people compare the leader’s appearance to the cartoon bear.

    It didn’t mention Xi Jinping by name – I have not yet found any way for DeepSeek to mention him – but this was enough for the Great Firewall. DeepSeek once again wiped away its answer, replacing it with the oh so innocent:

    Sorry, I’m not sure how to approach this type of question yet. Let’s chat about math, coding, and logic problems instead!

    DeepSeek has other problems. It hallucinates more than western models (i.e. making up stuff), and its answers can be quite generic and shallow, particularly if you know a subject area well. These are just hitches though – particularly if your main use of DeepSeek is programming – and DeepSeek has no right to be this capable. It’s not even made by a true AI company. DeepSeek is a side-project for the Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer – and yet, their R1 model is more powerful than any publicly available AI model from Google, Meta, X, or Inflection, and it’s close to the best from Anthropic and o1, despite being way, way, way cheaper.

    That’s a big deal for western developers, who can use it to save a lot of money; and it’s a transformative one for those in developing countries, particularly in India and Africa. This will be used a lot, and that should alarm everyone.

    China developed its Great Firewall to close off its citizens from the free world’s information, locking into their own informational bubble. But with TikTok and DeepSeek, Xi is trying to expand that bubble, to sway the global south, as well as the gullible West, with their propaganda.

    Useful idiots – with hammer and sickle emojis in their Twitter usernames – are already cheering on DeepSeek’s answers on the war in Gaza, where it happily shares the Chinese anti-Zionist propaganda line, as it does on American foreign policy and the Korean War, where it puts little blame on the Communist North.

    Just don’t ask it about Tibetan exile, Xi Jinping’s first wife, starvation from the Great Leap Forward, the impacts of the Cultural Revolution, the Hong Kong protests, ‘Grass-Mud Horse’, ‘Tank Man’, ‘Empty Chair’, or what happened to Jimmy Lai.

    DeepSeek doesn’t have any thoughts on those.

    Let’s talk about something else.

    WRITTEN BY
    Ross Anderson

  113. I've been watching a series of program's on bbc4 about Egypt with Dan Cruickshank.
    Excellent presentation. I'm now even more convinced that those people where from another planet.

    1. I know exactly what you mean about Dan – his breathlessness indicates not enough oxygen in the atmosphere on Earth….

      1. The poor chap was born in London as I was…..what might you expect 🫁🗣
        Lungs and a cough I think. 😮‍💨

  114. From Coffee house, the Spectator

    Last week was surely one of the grimmest in Europe in years. The day after an Afghan migrant allegedly stabbed a two-year-old boy in Germany to death, Axel Rudakubana was sentenced to 52 years in prison for murdering Alice, Bebe and Elsie, three little English girls with a combined age of 22, in Southport.

    The court heard that Rudakubana told police in the immediate aftermath of the killing: ‘It’s a good thing those children are dead…I’m so glad…so happy’. What we didn’t hear enough about was the exact nature of his extremism. We know that an Al-Qaeda training manual was found in his bedroom, and that he was referred to the Prevent counter-terrorism programme twice in 2021, once for uploading images of Colonel Gaddafi, and once for researching the London Bridge atrocity of 2017 when an Islamist terror cell murdered eight people. We also know, because the BBC and other media outlets are desperate to point it out, that he was ‘obsessed’ with Adolf Hitler and had ‘an interest in Nazi Germany’.

    There has been little urgency, and very little honesty, about the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe

    In the coverage of the Southport attack, there are shades of the same dissimulation that characterised the reporting of an atrocity in the French town of Annecy in the summer of 2023. On that occasion, a knifeman ran amok in a playground, stabbing several toddlers, before a passerby intervened. Within hours, it was reported that the suspected perpetrator was a Christian refugee from Syria because that was what he told the police.

    The truth has emerged thanks to Henri d’Anselme, the passerby who prevented more bloodshed. He is a genuine Christian – he was in Annecy on a pilgrimage of French cathedrals – and in an interview last month d’Anselme disclosed what he had been told by the magistrate in charge of the case.

    Abdalmasih Hanoun apparently deserted the Syrian army to join the Islamic State, but soon fell out with them. Fearing for his life, he fled to Europe and claimed political asylum. Hanoun was reportedly informed that his claim would have more chance of success if he said he was either a Christian or a homosexual. He chose the former, entering Sweden as a Christian who was fleeing religious persecution.

    Christianity was also the cover story chosen by Emad al-Swealmeen, the 32-year-old Iraqi who claimed he had converted from Islam in order to remain in the UK. He was killed by his own bomb before he could detonate it in a Liverpool maternity hospital in 2021.

    The Libyan whose suicide bomb killed 22 young people at the Manchester Arena in 2017 had also duped his adopted country into believing he was proud to live in the West. In fact, Salman Abedi had been raised in a ‘strict Islamic household’ in Manchester by a father who had never renounced the Islamism that had forced him to flee Gaddafi’s Libya in 1991.

    In the past decade, Europe has remained as stubborn as ever in its refusal to confront Islamic extremism. This is despite the many deadly Islamist attacks across the continent in that time: Barcelona, Brussels, Paris, London, Mannheim, Strasbourg, Reading, Nice, Marseille, Vienna, Oslo, Arras and Solingen.

    There have been other incidents, attacks of the sort Europe had thought it had eradicated 80 years ago: a ‘Jew hunt’ in Amsterdam, synagogues burned in France, Jews assaulted in London and in Berlin a warning from the police for Jews to ‘hide’ their identities in some parts of the city.

    The perpetrators are Europe’s new anti-Semites, as Berlin police chief Barbara Slowik explained in November. ‘There are certain neighbourhoods where the majority of people of Arab origin live, who also have sympathies for terrorist groups,’ she said. ‘Open anti-Semitism is expressed there against people of the Jewish faith.’

    It is the same in France, where there has been a steady exodus of Jews since the day in 2012 when an Islamist filmed himself shooting dead three children in the playground of a Jewish school in Toulouse. In the wake of that atrocity, the EU conducted a survey into anti-Semitism on the continent and discovered that such cases had risen dramatically in the past five years. Jewish respondents in eight countries – including France, Germany and the UK – reported that those with ‘extreme views’ and people with ‘left-wing political views’ were responsible for the most serious prejudice.

    The EU said that countries should work ‘urgently’ to combat the spread of anti-Semitism. That call fell on deaf ears. There has been little urgency, and very little honesty, about the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe this century.

    The terrifying truth is that Europe has not the faintest idea how to combat the spread of Islamism across the continent. It is a two-pronged offensive, what the French observers of Islamism call ‘cutting the head and cutting the tongue’. Cutting the head is to physically kill your enemies; cutting the tongue is to silence them intellectually, either through death threats or career-ending accusations of ‘Islamophobia’.

    Europeans are now frightened to even talk about Islam, far less criticise any aspect of the religion. After all, who wants to end up like the French schoolteacher Samuel Paty, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh or the staff of Charlie Hebdo? Slain at the hands of ‘Islamic fascists’, a term coined by President George W Bush in 2006, but which never caught on in Europe.

    It is far easier to find ‘fascism’ elsewhere, like in America, where in recent days both Donald Trump and Elon Musk have been labelled as such. The latter was described by a German historian, Jens-Christian Wagner, who runs the Buchenwald memorial, as a ‘mad and right-wing extremist’. He advised Musk to ‘take a history book and withdraw for three days, read the history book and please be quiet with the poison he’s spreading’.

    Europe’s progressive elite appears to believe that Musk is a Hitler-in-waiting, what with that salute. The solution of some of them is to shut down X, the social media platform he runs and through which, in their view, he is spreading his poison. But will banning X stop the synagogues being burned down? Will it stop the Jew hunts and will it put an end to the knife attacks? No. Then what will? To that question, Europe has not the answer.

    Gavin Mortimer
    WRITTEN BY
    Gavin Mortimer
    Gavin Mortimer is a British author who lives in Burgundy after many years in Paris. He writes about French politics, terrorism and sport.

    1. The image is doing the rounds because it was deliberately chosen. It's a nonsense consciously taken out of context to give the hard Left an excuse to destroy Musk. They haven't the money to confront him so are trying to legislate him out of existence – all because he said no.

  115. The Go Compare chappie has beeen suspended. He apparently made a remark about 'Spit Roast' I had no idea what it meant (innocent as I am).

    The Urban Dictionary is your friend. Talk about Sodom & Gomorrah…..

    1. I dated a girl who was very pleased with her threesome. Then I suggested a foursome so she could be properly used.

      We didn't last. Apparently I'm still not good at detecting narcissim.

      2. The only time I had a threesome I ended up making the tea while the other two got it on…..story of my life really….it was a long time ago…..

      3. I was about to say you don’t need a date when you have Lucy and the Warqueen but then I looked up “spit roast” and realised I’d quite misunderstood!

    1. Everything she says makes him seem like an astute businessman. I don't like him and his ambitions, but that's not exactly an exposé.

      1. She's done some better ones on how he's f*cked up farming and immune systems in rural India.

  117. I am just researching visits to various English Heritage sites. I have just discovered "if you’ve been granted refugee status or have been given leave to remain as a displaced person, you can visit English Heritage sites for free. You’ll need to show your Biometric Residency Permit (BRP) when you arrive. You can’t pre-book your visit.

    These sites represent the best of England’s heritage, and we’re proud to share them with people who have been forced to leave their home countries because of war or persecution." Bloody hell! It's MY effing heritage and I have to pay!

  121. A lot off Brits are feeling like displaced persons in their own land, but who will treat us as well as these so called refugees are treated here?

    1. As I have and so many other British people have now become inside grasp of the NHS, no longer patients but Victim's.

    1. I just looked that up. Who gives a shit what shade your arsehole is? Where's the world gone to?

  123. I've just been to my monthly Book Club, so have decided to have an early night tonight. Good Night, chums, sleep well, and see you all tomorrow.

    1. OH gave up on it halfway through and I was busy trying to send out minutes of a meeting, so wasn't watching. Was it better than the last two? – they were quite silly and gratuitously gory.

      1. We enjoyed it .

        Of course, Moh commented , female British pilot in charge of aircraft flying out of India , possibly bio terrorism/or Ebola or some nasty virus ..

        Bit like Boris flying in aircraft full of migrants/ tourists from China and Asia , instead of grounding all flights at the start of the Covid fright!

  126. 400612+ up ticks,

    Pillow ponder,

    ALL the ingredients are in place and being built on daily, judging by out voting actions these past forty years WE as a nation would allow to happen first off
    we WOULD lead the worldwide field in being first to go down many carrying the "how did this happen" into captivity suffering acutely from mass Victor Mildew malady "I don't believe it"
    https://x.com/JimFergusonUK/status/1883500234619203930

    3. Love the way the Lutenist slipped in at 1:04 as though he had missed the bus and was late for the kick-off!

  129. In 1968 I went to Moscow – not in uniform, I was a student. Shopping was interesting, shall we say?

      1. Ah, but the hours of queueing required to find out quite how limited the choice was…

      2. You spent a lot of time queueing. 🙂 Then you had to go to the next shop and queue for something else 🙂

    1. Night, C.

      We're hunkering down over here at 7pm. It's pretty brutal outside with the winds and the snow. On the upside, there is Empress 1908 gin in the glass, and chili in the oven.

  131. Early morning chuckle for the insomniacs among us…..

    Jack staggers into A&E with two black eyes and a five iron wrapped around his throat.
    The doctor asks him what happened?

    “Well it was like this,” said Jack. “I was having a quiet game of golf with my wife when she sliced her ball into a pasture of cows.
    We went to look for it and while I was rooting around, I noticed one of the cows had something white at its rear end.
    I walked over and lifted up the tail and sure enough, there was my wife’s golf ball; stuck right in the middle of the cows arse. That’s when I made my mistake."

    “What did you do?” asks the doctor.

    “Well, I lifted the tail and yelled to my wife, “Hey, this looks like yours!”

    2. Morning Stephenroi, another insomniac? You are very welcome to join those of us who post funnies.
      Please continue to contribute these chuckles – we NEED something to offset the increasingly appalling news emanating from Wastemonster.
      I have a permanent '6-hour alarm' installed inside my head, so if I put the lights out at 11PM I will wake for sure at 05:00 plus or minus a bit. This means I often watch films last thing at night to extend my Lights-out time and obtain a more civilised 6AM wakeup.

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